Even before Trump “paused” his questionable trade policy yesterday, Wall Street analysts offered updated projections for where they thought the stock market would finish up the year. The S&P 500 started the year at 5,869 and had dipped below 5,000 (-15%) after Trump’s 10% minimum tariff and demand for balancing trade deficits. Still, most investment banks were quite positive in their forecasts for where the … Continue reading Crystal Ball Predictions
Plenty of people are running scared after the bears trampled -10.5% out of Wall Street on Thursday & Friday. I’m not sure what will happen to the S&P 500 on Monday morning (futures are -2.5% as I write this on Sunday night), but I’m keeping the faith that some order will be restored over the next few weeks, months, and years. If you saved for … Continue reading Staying The Course …
Just a short, early end-of-the-week post today. I’m trying to make sense of the headlines coming out of Washington DC. I think it’s safe to say that they are more nonsense than common sense. It’s no surprise that the market is in a bit of a free-fall today. How do these make sense …. ? I don’t follow this … If we’re getting $7T in … Continue reading Stormy Fiscal Headlines
Our neighborhood in Florida has a weekly “Investment Club” that I went to this past Friday. There were about 15 people gathered when I got there – in the events ballroom of our clubhouse. We started by talking about our 2025 expectations for the stock market’s growth. After two years of incredible growth (+23% in 2024, +24% in 2023), most people were expecting growth in … Continue reading Investment Club
Everyone is a genius in a bull market, and we’ve had a nice run over the last 10 years. The S&P 500 has grown from 2000 to 6000 over that period of time for a healthy +11.6% growth rate. The last 10 years have been amazing: 2024: 23.3%, 2023: 24.2%, 2022: -19.4%, 2021: 26.9%, 2020: 16.3%, 2019: 28.9%, 2018: -6.2%, 2017: 19.4%, 2016: 9.5%, 2015: … Continue reading Bulls & Bears
I went deep down the Social Security benefit timing rabbit hole this week. I built a little spreadsheet to look at SSI lifetime benefit at different “start ages” and added in the value of taking SSI pre-age 67 and investing it. These are my currently projected benefits from the MySocialSecurity website. I assumed a conservative 3% investment return on the early dollars. You can see … Continue reading One More Look At Early SSI …
A friend of mine was surprised when I shared this table adjusting the return of 401k balances for inflation over the last 4 years. It shows that despite the relative strength in the stock market, real returns for 401k balances are DOWN about 9%. “That’s not right!” he said – “the S&P 500 is an an all-time high. It’s up almost 50% since the … Continue reading 401k Returns – Not As Good As You Think
I’ve been saying for about a year that the economy seems to be “wobbly”. It hasn’t been clear if the economy is going to improve (see: Bidenomics), or tip toward recession (see: Bidenflation). Increasingly, it seems like we are tipping the wrong way. This morning, the Dow Jones crashed 1,000+ points – compounding on losses last week. I will note that the Dow remains UP … Continue reading Wobbling The Wrong Way
I see a lot of headlines in the news lately touting how high the stock market has gone. It is true that the S&P 500 has reached a new Apex – up +19% YTD to almost 5,600. At the same time, few in the mainstream media are noting that the bond market has tumbled markedly in the last two years (down -16%). Compared with equities, … Continue reading A Tale of Two Markets
We’re sitting down with our financial planner on Monday for our annual portfolio checkup. The key issue we need to think through is the relative balance of our portfolio between safe/less safe investments and those which are liquid/illiquid. When we bought our condominium in Celebration FL in February, I was a bit concerned our portfolio would be getting a bit heavy in real estate. In … Continue reading Rebalancing Act
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