We don’t know what the stock market will do next. We have opinions and hunches, and we never act on them. We never try to predict the market’s next move. Neither we nor anyone else is good at it. The only thing we can do is to trim the sails of our portfolio to align with the winds of inflation.
Stock Market
Some investors think the fewer positions you own, the cooler you are. I remember meeting two investors at a conference. One had a seven-stock portfolio, the other had three stocks. Sadly, the financial crisis humbled both. On the other hand, too many positions breeds indifference. At IMA, our portfolio construction process is built from a first-principles perspective.
I was having lunch with a close friend of mine. He mentioned that he had accumulated a significant sum of money and did not know what to do with it. It was sitting in bonds, and inflation was eating its purchasing power at a very rapid rate.
There happens to be a cryptocurrency, one of thousands, that is also named Omicron. I still cannot grasp the logic behind it, but that cryptocurrency was up 900% on the day the South African variant was christened. There must have been a trading algorithm or a lot of bored investors looking for the next gamble, to drive something seemingly worthless up 900%.
In investing, there are many “games to play”. There are a lot of ways to try to make money in the market, and not all of them are good, rational, or productive over the long term.
I go over why we may be entering a sideways market (I wrote two books on this subject), as well as how to invest in them.
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