How you just lost money in a stock market that’s up 40% August 5, 2009
Posted by Jeff Nabers in Money, Personal Productivity, Self Directed IRA/401k.Tags: 1913, chart, collapse, crash, currency, depression, dollar, dow jones, fed, fiat, gains, history, inflation, invest, investing, investment, long run, long term, losses, rebound, recession, risk, stock market
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Headlines abound, the stock market is up 40% from its March lows!!! Let’s all celebrate. Those who spoke badly of Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner have their foots in their mouths, right?
Not even close. These types of misleading headlines are the very weaponry of a financial system that tricks you, lures you, spikes your drink, robs you blind while you’re partying, and then nurses you back to sobriety in the morning by giving you another spiked drink.
Imagine you have $100 in the stock market. You experience a 40% loss. You now have $60. And, abracadabra, the economic rescuers have juiced the market back up 40%. You now have $84. Wait a tick, how exactly do I get back to $100? Well to recover from a 40% loss, you would need a 67% gain. You see, 40% of $60 is much less than 40% of $100, so the initial 40% loss was much larger than the 40% gain that followed. For those whose livelihood involves serious math, this is very obvious. For the rest of us, it should be an “ah ha” moment that exposes the red arrow, green arrow game.
Watching and listening to the financial news networks report about the stock market is like watching a sports game. And it entertains just like a sports game. In the midst of entertaining, it lulls us into watching the red and green arrows. Oh, it’s down today a few points. Hey look, it came back up. It feels very much like watching a basketball team surrender and regain the lead in a basketball game. If they are down by 40 points, and then they score 41 uncontested points, they have the lead and they win the game!
But it doesn’t work the same in percentage points. But just wait, over the long term the losses will be recovered and there will be profit, say the “experts” whose payroll checks are signed by Wall Street. If you buy that line of baloney, you will be further tricked. Because over the long term those losses will be recovered and there will be profits… but only as measured in dollars. If you factor in how over the long term those dollars buy less stuff, you will not find a substantial long-term profit.
Today the Dow closed at $9,320. But the dollar has lost over 96% of its purchasing power since 1913. Take 96% out of today’s Dow price and you get $372. In 1913, the Dow was at about $62. So the Dow Jones Industrial Average grew from $62 to $372 (in constant 1913 dollars) over a period of 96 years. That’s an annualized rate of return of 1.88%.
This bears repeating…
The Dow Jones has returned 1.88% per year for the past 96 years
Can you still get excited about a stock market that’s up 40% since its March lows when it is still a stock market that hasn’t even been able to produce an actual 2.00% return over the long run?
Or even more important questions: Is it worth the risk of losing a big chunk of the money you worked for just to “get some action” in a market that produces less than a 2.00% return over the long run? When you are down, can you wait decades without touching your money just to get back to your break-even point?
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Jeff Nabers is author of 5 STEPS TO FREEDOM: How to Cut Your Dependence on Institutions and Escape Financial Slavery
Are We Putting All Our Eggs in One Basket? June 10, 2009
Posted by reformedinvestor in Uncategorized.Tags: 401k, investing, stock market
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The Wall Street Journal reported on a study that $14 trillion dollars were being held in retirement assets in 2008. Sixty-five percent of that total was in employer-sponsored defined contribution plans and about 25% of those assets were held in IRAs. Now don’t you think that is a lot of dough entrusted into an institution that has royally failed us?
Am I “The Greater Fool”? June 2, 2009
Posted by reformedinvestor in Money, real estate, Self Directed IRA/401k.Tags: investing, real estate, stock market
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After reading an advance copy of Jeff Nabers’ new book, I learned more about the concept of “The Greater Fool.” This theory says that people buy things thinking that it will go up in price and value and that a “greater fool” will come along and buy the thing for more.
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Young investors can afford to play it safe when it comes to investing May 12, 2009
Posted by reformedinvestor in Money, Self Directed IRA/401k.Tags: investing, stock market, strategy, wealth
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[Post contributed by reformedinvestor]
I recently learned that I may have been given bad investment advice. I’m 32 now but I started working with a financial advisor when I was 26 years old. At the time the stock market was the way to go. If you weren’t invested in the stock market you were missing out. So I socked all my savings away in the safest and most lucrative thing I knew, Wall Street.
My financial advisor told me that because I was so young, I should invest a bit more aggressively. It made perfect sense; after all, I had 30-40 years to go until retirement. I could ride the ups and downs of the market cycles.
But what no one told me (more…)
S&P Price-to-Earnings Ratio Says Market is Still 70% Overpriced March 3, 2009
Posted by Jeff Nabers in Money, Self Directed IRA/401k.Tags: 401k, bail, bailout, buy, crash, dow, dow jones, government, invest, investing, investment, ira, market, obama, out, P/E, panic, price-to-earnings, ratio, S&P, s&p 500, self directed, sell, solo, Solo 401k, stimulus, stock market, timing, wall street, when
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If you are choosing to stay in the stock market right now because of any of the following reasons…
- It is poised to bounce back
- You don’t want to close out losing positions
- Stocks are cheap right now
…then the simplicity of the following information may shock you.
Last week (more…)
This January was worst for stock market in 113 years February 22, 2009
Posted by Jeff Nabers in Money.Tags: deficit, government, history, medicaid, medicare, obama, performance, responsible, social security, spending, stimulus, stock market
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According to the article The Market Is Shorting Obama’s ‘Stimulus’, we’ve just had the worst January in over 113 years of the stock market. Professors of Finance, Ecomonics, and Law at the University of Kansas and George Mason University report that the stock market is not impressed by Obama’s stimulus. Read the whole story here.
While 99% of the stories out there that use logic and reason to argue (more…)
The Top 5 Investing Myths of 2008 January 5, 2009
Posted by Jeff Nabers in Money, Personal Enjoyment, Personal Productivity, real estate, Self Directed IRA/401k.Tags: 2008, 2009, 401k, adviser, advisor, bailout, financial planner, government, invest, investing, invstment, ira, ira llc, losses, madoff, meltdown, Money, plan, recover, regain, scam, SEC, self directed, solo, Solo 401k, stock market, strategy, wall street
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2008 was a very interesting year to say the least. Possibly the most productive outcome of the year was the restless message of “rethink things” coming from the little voice beckoning each of us in our minds.
Myth #1… The SEC keeps investment information honest and accurate
The Securities and Exchange Commission (abbr “SEC”) should be done away with. The Madoff debacle along with the dozens of other securities frauds that draw less (or no) attention every single year should be evidence that the SEC is failing. It is tasked with making investments safe and transparent and is having the opposite effect. When an investor or fund manager is considering a particular investment, they believe that the investment is truthful, transparent, and honest because the SEC is supposed to regulate it into such a position. The result can be decreased due diligence because of reliance on the SEC. This leads to disaster when the SEC ends up not doing its job very well. If we didn’t expect the SEC to be “keeping investing safe and honest” then investors and asset managers would take a closer look at investment opportunities which would result in better thought out decisions. I’m not saying the SEC should be doing a better job – I’m saying we shouldn’t expect regulation to create investment safety in the first place.
I believe the SEC does more harm than good by offering a false sense of security.
Myth #2… Financial planners give good investment advice
Something very interesting happened in the last 15 or so years: Stock brokerages spent millions of dollars convincing the American public that securities salesman had become “financial planners”. That move alone shifted the perception of almost every American and the magnitude of Wall Street’s success (theirs, not yours). A “stock broker” is to securities as a car salesman is to cars… but a financial planner sounds a lot like somebody whose job it is to plan your finances. What actually changed to make stock brokers become financial planners? (more…)
When the economy attacks: Fed fights back with toy gun December 16, 2008
Posted by Jeff Nabers in Money.Tags: debt, economy, expenense, fed, federal reserve, government, income, interest rate, invest, investments, key rate, overnight lending rate, stock market, unemployment
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Today the Federal Reserve lowered their key rate to 0%. Huh? How does our economy work when money is lent for no interest? Well, they technically lowered the key rate to a range of 0% to 0.25%. This is the first time the Fed’s key rate has been this low ever. Without getting into a long, complex examination of this let’s take a very simple look at our economic problems:
- Consumers spent more money than they had by borrowing and going into debt
- Lenders lent money to consumers who did not have the capacity to repay the loans
- The government spent more money than it had by borrowing and increasing debt
- Lenders lent money to the government who does not have the capacity to repay the loans
If we had a free market, (more…)
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