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Why the Dow Jones Reaching 20,000 Is Not As Important As You May Think

The big headline the other day was news of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) reaching 20,000 for the first time. It’s gathered headlines all over the world. I counted 13 articles in The Wall Street Journal about the Dow 20,000. Most of the mainstream media has been quick to jump on what this means for investors, the market, and the future. And some of that thinking is flawed. This post will focus on putting this milestone in perspective for you and, more importantly, what it means for your investments.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is probably the most iconic index. When someone says the market is up 150 points, they are referring to the DJIA. It has a long track record – about 130 years! So on the surface this milestone is impressive. It took the Dow over 100 years to reach 10,000. It took 18 years for it to reach 20,000. But it took only 42 days to go from 19,000 to 20,000. That’s the second fastest thousand point gain in history. So what does that mean for you? To answer that, we need to pull pack the curtain to understand what is the Dow Jones Industrial Average:

  • It is an index consisting of 30 companies. That’s a very small representation of the overall market and can completely misrepresent how the whole market is doing in reality.
  • The Dow Jones is 100% US stocks which represent a single asset class. On top of that, it skews heavily toward large-cap industrial companies. This may have been valuable 130 years ago when the index was first created, but the economy has changed drastically since this index was first created. No longer are industrial companies an accurate representation of the overall market like they once were.
  • A company is included in the DJIA because it was selected by a committee of the Wall Street Journal. They actively decide which companies should be included and which should be removed.
  • The common methodology to determine the weighting of each company is very unusual. Most modern indexes are weighted based on the market capitalization – the bigger the company, the larger representation it holds in the index. The DJIA weights the company based on the share price of each stock. The larger the price per share, the larger the weight in the index. That puts Goldman Sachs as the largest holding at about 8% and GE at the second lowest (about 1%). This reason for this methodology dates back to a time before computers when a simple methodology was needed.
  • Here is a technical issue – the DJIA was prone to inaccurate calculations before computers were used to track the index. In going back to the very beginning and correcting all the mistakes, the DJIA passed 30,000 last month.
  • While you can’t invest directly in indexes, you can invest in indexes the mimic and replicate the performance of the underlying index. When you total the dollar amount that tracks the DJIA, it adds up to about $36 billion. To put that in perspective – over $2 trillion track some version of the S&P 500!

As you can see, this is a deeply flawed and outdated index. It serves very little use for most investors because of these flaws. It is not a good gauge of the overall health of the market or the economy. It barely does a good job of capturing the health of industrial segment of our economy in the US. It should never compared to a broad, diversified investment portfolio. So the Dow reaching 20,000 is a big story about an out-of-date index.

Critiquing a Financial Plan

The following article examines five young people and their financial plan (more like their lack of planning).  They are then offered some preliminary advice about how to improve their situation.  Unfortunately, in every case I found the advice to be overly simplified.  Here’s the article

And here are some overarching strategies that apply to all the case studies:

1)      Emergency fund.  Start here first and make it a priority to build an emergency fund that can cover non-discretionary expenses for 3-6 months.

2)      Save more.  If you can’t save more now, earmark any future raise toward saving.  When asked about a rule of thumb for how much to save, I’ll often respond with “Save as much as you can”.  Young people and millennials are unlikely to have pensions and with the questionable future of Social Security, the burden to save is placed on their shoulders much more than previous generations.

3)      Automate.  Make sure any savings are set to occur automatically.  The mental anguish of writing a check every month or year to a retirement account can be surprisingly difficult.  Many times it is our own biases that create obstacles to reaching our own goal and simple processes like automating our savings can have a huge impact.

4)      Disability.  Life insurance is commonly discussed when a couple has children.  But disability insurance is rarely brought up.  What’s odd is that people are more likely to file a claim for disability insurance than life insurance.  And it doesn’t apply just to physical injuries, either.  We’ve had several clients and prospects tell us about their long term disability that affects their ability to do a desk job as a result of a bad car crash.

 

The Best Stocks To Invest In Right Now

How many times have you seen that headline? How many times did it spur you to read an article and even take action? Well respected publications are famous for putting together these kinds of lists. The odd part is that every month, week, or even day that list changes. This morning I saw headlines like these “ The Best Value Plays of 2017”, “These Stocks are Poised to Grow”, “These Stocks Will Surge With Trump”.

This is part of the Fake News problem we’re dealing with. Editors and journalists know that those headlines are going to generate the clicks and your attention. They want your attention long enough for you to see the ads and don’t care at all if those investment ideas are good.

Publications and the media are in the business of selling ad space. Any recommendations should be taken with a grain salt.

How To Save, When You Can’t Save Today

“ I want to save for retirement, but I can’t afford to do so right now.”

This is a common complaint we hear, especially with our younger clients. They are dealing with debts, saving for their children’s education, and even helping to take care of their aging parents. These younger clients want to save for retirement but just don’t know what to do.

So, what should they do?

Over the last few months I have written about this concept extensively:
Is a Creative Saving Strategy Right For Me?
The Most overlooked Saving Strategy: The Serial Payment
The Three Flaws With The Most Popular Saving Strategy

The strategy that I outline is to come up with a plan to consistently save more and more every year. Perhaps you save an extra 1% of your paycheck each year, or every year allocate a portion of your raise to retirement. This concept is also referred to as Saving For Tomorrow, Tomorrow and there is a great Ted Talk about it here.

If you’re on board with this concept, visit this New York Times calculator to see how this could work for you: One Percent More Calculator

Einstein is claimed to have said that “Compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world”. And by combining the benefits of compounding interest and compounding savings into a retirement plan, it would make for a much, much more powerful strategy.

How to Deal With the 2016 Presidential Election and Your Portfolio

It’s tempting to position your portfolio to take advantage of new policies being proposed by a new President before they have been elected or shortly after their election. Evidence suggests it’s better to wait instead of trying to time the market.

Here are a few strategies to keep in mind over the next few months:

  • Expect volatility as the election draws near. The markets do not like it when there are looming questions about the future direction of the country. Most likely this volatility is short term and will clear up as investors digest the implications of one president over the other. This will be especially true if the candidates target a particular industry (such as health care or defense).
  • Remember you are a long-term investor. Much of the noise and headlines will not have a long term impact on your investment future.
  • Stay the course with your investment strategy. The candidates, their respective parties, think-tanks, experts, pundits and the media will try very hard to rattle your cage to sway your opinion and to get your vote. They will use fear tactics or they will paint rosy pictures of the future. And unfortunately, many investors will make poor investment choices prior to the election. They will move to cash if they are afraid or they will move into an asset class they believe will soar if their candidate wins.
  • Any significant policy changes will take months to develop and potential a year to roll out.

Why We Shouldn’t Mix Politics and Investing?

We can’t help but hear about the election on the news. And when it comes to each candidates economic policies, we are quick to imagine how it will affect our investments. We assume that Trump’s determination to bring jobs back to the US could boost US stock prices and perhaps hurt foreign stock prices. We think that because Clinton has talked about reform on Wall Street, that financial companies would be hurt if she were elected President.

But the connection isn’t as clear as the media makes it out to be. Both politics and the markets are very complex systems with many, many moving parts. We are quick to arrive at various conclusions as to cause and effect. Or quick to identify patterns. In reality, it’s nearly impossible to predict how presidential policies will affect the stock market. We may think we see a pattern or understand cause and effect, but there could be more factors contributing to the expected outcome

All of these thoughts can be connected to a set of common investing errors that are discussed in a growing field of behavioral economics. The following article does a great job of capturing some of these elements