Have you ever noticed how investing is a little like vacation planning?
Each year, when you’re deciding how you want to spend your summer holidays, you think about how much time you have, how much you can afford, and what you can do to have a fun and memorable summer. Then, you call your travel agent and start packing.
Three issues in a complicated world.
No doubt there are many things both wrong and right with investing today. That being said, there will be millions of folks who end up with mediocre results for any number of reasons. Our goal in looking at this question is to develop a sense of what's going on at the 'macro' level to disadvantage the retail investor.
Change is a good thing.
Ch.. ch.. changes.
From time to time the fine folks at Standard and Poors, who created the S&P 100 Index, tune their results to account for acquisitions, spinouts and the other typical stock organizational changes. The FOX-Disney acquisition/spinout of 2019 was a recent and complicated such a case. For Beyond ETFs users FOX and FOXA had been in the Buy* Zone for the better part of the year prior to March 2019.
Modern Day Lessons in Investing
Here’s a short story about PG’s entry into and departure from my stock trading/retirement-investment account from 2018. Lessons still hold true - very true.
Years ago, in business school, my professor talked about an important marketing principle: Worth What Paid For. The idea is to question 'is that product or service worth what the customer paid for it?'
Really?
This post was originally presented in BeyondETFs Pro in August 2019.
Further to our series of Tips on avoiding common mistakes in investing, here are three surprisingly common mistakes that professional portfolio managers make and how Beyond ETFs subscribers avoid them. In The Only Thing the Smart Money is Smart About, a July 12, 2019 article by Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal, timely research flags the most frequent mistakes that professional portfolio managers make.
Recent events remind me of the fundamentals of why we created this app
This article was originally posted in November of 2020, but fundamentally still holds true.