Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
On Monday, the building, build back better infrastructure build was supposed to get passed on, based on the house would say the 27th is their deadline? You know, should I be looking to invest in infrastructure to take advantage of this bill?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, I think a couple things, you can’t be a little careful investing in something that might happen on a political basis, because you’re right, they put a line in the sand, so to speak, that they wanted the infrastructure bill passed by the 27th, which is Monday. And, but they’re trying to attach it to the reconciliation package. And I’ve actually heard a lot of rumors saying that there aren’t enough votes to get the infrastructure package passed on the 27th. because there aren’t enough votes to get through the the reconciliation package. So all he’s always when you’re dealing with the government, especially Congress, you know, keep that in mind. Because, you know, just it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen. There are some really great infrastructure ETFs, Exchange Traded Funds, and one that we have used in the past is a company called BlackRock, which is one of the largest money managers in the world. And they have a grouping of ETFs, called IE shares. And they have the Ishares infrastructure ETF and the ticker symbols IFRA, for example. So we’ve had that in our portfolios in the past, I think it’s a pretty decent way of playing it’s it’s got a nice broad exposure, but there are specific Exchange Traded Funds, I have no problem with going into those types of things. But one of the things I will say about the market this year, especially since mid February, it has been just rotating around from one thing to another so fast, you know, infrastructure is hot, but it’s only hot for a week or a month or, whereas last year, things ran really long, I mean, 612 18 months, we had some trends that were going and this year there, the trends have been so short, that unless you’re a day trader, and a good one knows what’s going to happen, you’re really not benefitting by very much.
And just buying the entire S&P 500 or buying the, you know, entire stock market, like the Vanguard total stock market index, for example. Actually, that’s what we’re doing now, because of the fact that the trends aren’t happening, because what will happen is when they pass that infrastructure bill, I suspect there’ll be a pop in the overall market, and you might make more pop in that infrastructure piece. But this year, you can’t guarantee that that trend is going to last very long. The other issue about infrastructure in terms of buying in on a trend is that that bill is an eight year payout bill. And so those companies are not going to get the money on Monday. You know, so it’s gonna take a long time for that to come through to earnings. And so and that’s another whole other process is who’s actually going to get the money. And that is why I like to buy a whole basket, you know, the Exchange Traded Funds, you buy a whole bunch of different stocks that fit in those categories. And infrastructure as a whole, even globally is a great investment. But at this point in time, honestly, I would be looking at just what’s going on in the total stock market being well invested there so that when those packages do pass, and they will pass at some point in my opinion, then you would probably see a really nice, you know, return come out of that whole stock market and not have to guess that it’s going to come through this group of companies, because that isn’t working very well this year.