Down goes the Dow

You say your holdings are not tech-heavy but they are more tech-heavy than you realize. Since you are wealthy, you might own some Berkshire Hathaway. $551,000 per share. The holdings? Just about 50% is AAPL. You like Vanguard, most of their popular funds are similar. Vanguard Total Stock market - Top holdings:

Apple

MSFT

AMZN

NVDA

GOOG

META

GOOGL

TSLA

7 largest holdings are Tech. Many of the popular funds are like that.

Not a bad call here....6 months ago saying if three things happen we'd get a 20% rally. They happened and we got a 11% rally.

- Infl cooled

-AI rally continued

- Market breadth improved

finance.yahoo.com

The stock market could rally 20% through the rest of this year if it can clear 3 key hurdles, Fundstrat says

"As we move into the the second week of June, our confidence that [the] S&P 500 will gain >20% in 2023 has increased," Fundstrat's Tom Lee said.

Open link

Painfully bad call here from a long/short guy.

March 2023. NVDA was at $277. Dude predicted NVDA would be a $100 stock in 2023, and he owned short term puts "in size" with a $250 strike.

Taken out on a stretcher. $500 stock now and never got to $250.

RJR Capital
@RJRCapital
$NVDA will be a $100 or less stock this year.

Turns out you can.

SP500 +9% from this tweet.

Endless Capital
@endless_frank
You cannot have the f'cking U.S Treasury market which drives the multiple of the U.S equity market absolutely f,cking imploding and not also have the U.S equity market implode.
This is insane. Buckle up.
2:19 PM · Sep 25, 2023
·
318.5K
Views

I think I saw him panhandling on the street. Would be interesting when he closed out his positions and how much overall he lost.

I would have posted the same, but thought “why bother.” Also, he talks often of his liquid hoard where he wouldn’t have to worry about the market for “X years.” If included, Flagpole would likely be well over the S&P 500 tech exposure, but why bother?

this rally is spreading out a bit, which has to be bullish. A big long rally in small caps would be the best thing that could happen to my portfolio.

3m:

Small Caps: +8.5%

SP500 +6.8%

Nope! My holdings are EXACTLY as tech heavy as I realize. Do I have holdings in tech? Of course. Am I "tech heavy?" No. I have significant holdings also in health care, energy, financials, real estate, entertainment, utilities, communications, durable goods, retail, construction, car makers, media, mining, industrials, hospitality, food and beverages...to name a few.

1) I find it odd and yet funny (funnier as this continues) why so many of you WANT me to be tech heavy. In this year when the NASDAQ has gone UP 42+%, it would be nice if I WERE so tech heavy (and yes I realize there is tech in other indicies). You realize my gain this year so far is about half that, right?

2) The "liquid hoard" is very easy to have in my situation. It is 3 YEARS currently of expenses, and since I have ZERO debt, that is super easy to have. I didn't even really try. We had a set amount we were investing, and the rest was just there to use as we needed/wanted, and it has just built up to where it is now...actually it's over 3 YEARS of expenses now, and it will continue to grow unless we decide to take a trip around the world or something like that before The Lovely Mrs. Flagpole decides to also retire. It has been a little more than 10 years now when I decided that I would rather have years of liquid expenses save than conservative holdings (bonds for example), and I do like that idea generally, but my portfolio has gained so much value since then that I no longer even need that liquid hoard. I could take a 2% withdrawal rate and have more money than we ever made in a year.

Flagpole has been right. Look at the S&P returns over 10, 20, and 30 year horizons, and the chances are about 75% that it has risen in any particular year.

My guess is that with trade situations, market control, currency wars, political trends, and so on, that trend should continue for, say, 10 years. Things might be shifting, but only slowly. Think about how those factors were 10 years ago, say from London 2012 onwards: pretty much the same, although there was the Arab spring, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, QE, QT, interest rate hikes, BRICS, US national debt, Japan national debt, Brexit, etc etc etc etc.

Nothing has really changed. Will it in the next 10 years? I can't see it.

OK, what is your YTD performance of just your equity holdings?

Please don't ask for specifics on Flagpole's portfolio performance numbers. Hell will freeze over before you see any of that. His performance numbers are more tightly secured than the gold in Fort Knox.

52-week highs all major indices

Econ growth forecasts ramping up, inflation forecasts ramping down...sweet spot!

And I'm curious to know exactly what those holdings are. Broad-market etf's, I would guess. Flagpole, what are your vehicles of choice?

there's no way to forecast out huge macro things.

I think it's not hard to see a problem in the West with aging, very wealthy populations who don't want immigrants...that kind of thing is tinder for right wing politicians who will attempt to kill the golden goose of postwar Euro-Americanism, by limiting immigration and starting trade wars. We probably can't continue on this sharp upward trajectory with shrinking populations!

The enemy is us, if we can stop voting in leaders who want to end it all in a blaze of righteous glory.

And of course we can all see a rising tide of war around the world...it wouldn't take a whole lot for that to get much worse, and that would be bad for everyone. Russia and Iran will continue to stoke wars all over along the edges of Western civ, and that will take a toll.

But sure, markets have been able to manage a whole lot of chaos over the last 10 years over even 50 years, which is heartening.

He doesn't do ETFs.

btw my equity holdings (no SP500 except for PM) are up only ~11% ytd, but I am mostly in cash (tbills <1yr)

For reference, the most generic portfolio possible - the Vanguard global 60/40 portfolio VSMGX, is up 14% this year to date.

We can argue about how to think about risk adjusted returns if you have 70%+ in stocks, but that Vanguard fund is a good measure of the generic return of the stock and bond markets this year. Pretty good year!

You say that, but the reality is that, what, 12 million illegals are currently in the USA from official figures? The actual amount is far in excess of that estimate, because by its nature, the number is unknowable. Add to that millions more coming, add to that legal immigration and breeding, and add to that the fact that many illegals are young men, and you have your solution. Same in Europe, it seems.

Trade wars? The euros still buy Russian gas and oil, and lots of it. The USA still buys Russian uranium, and lots of it. China is still buying European infrastructure like ports, and lots of them. USA is buying Venezuelan oil. Taiwanese plants shipping product to USA still get Chinese rare earths. Ukraine still shipping grain to Europe. etc etc etc etc. So-called trade wars are nothing but a bit of friction and political grandstanding, the reality on the ground is different.

You are right about global war stoking, but wrong about who has been doing it: it has squarely been the USA. But before this wave we had Syria, Kosovo simmering, Armenia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc--and the S&P still maintained its pace! Because it is the USA who continues to do it, so it is par for the course.

The only thing that might change some things are the demographics, but immigration is balancing that, and will continue to do so notwithstanding political jawboning. Even at that, in the USA, life expectancies are down, and are to my mind shockingly low for men. The demographics won't be as bad as forecasted. And the world continues to lap up American debt, same as ever, although China/Russia have withdrawn.

The US debt has been "unsustainable" for at least the last decade. Whatever! The USD just kept going for the past 10 years, even though it has been doomed to fail the whole time. Yeah, everything's "worse" now than 10 years ago, but if you had asked someone 10 years ago if we could survive these levels, they would have said no--and they would have been wrong.

Same thing now: you could ask someone about seemingly insane levels 10 years from now, and they would say the same thing: impossible! Whatever.

So Flagpole how old are you? Are you pivoting away from equities, or do you plan to do so?