The Constituent List of the S&P 500 is a Who’s Who of American business. To be added to the S&P 500, a company must be U.S. based and it must have aRead More…
I am no longer a Series 7 registered representative, so I am not making a recommendation.
But I am a private investor, and my personal Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) portfolio improvement today is focused on the energy sector.
Sell: State Street Global SPDR XLU
Buy: Strive Asset Management DRLL
Rationale: Move my personal funds out of ESG-infected funds.
Have a great day! ??
Joe G.
I’m just your average Joe money coach striving to eliminate ESG from my portfolio and my life!
Client meetings could not be more tense than the one between the Sterling Cooper ad execs and the honchos from Lucky Strike.
The good old days were over. The FTC was on a rampage, forbidding big tobacco from advertising their product as healthful. It was clear to the Lucky guys that the mass media’s propaganda had manipulated and misled the public into believing their product was linked to…”certain fatal diseases.”
Their competitor could no longer say “More Doctor’s Smoke Camels,” but neither could Lucky Strike, and while that may have leveled the playing field, the principal problem remained: How do we sell more cigarettes than the other guys?
Through thick clouds of smoke, they coughed and complained about their new reality. The problem seemed insurmountable, and it was apparent the ad men walked into this pivotal client meeting without a campaign.
Awkward silence and paper shuffling punctuated the coughing fits. Ambitious and eager to advance, Pete, the inexperienced Sterling account man offered an idea so lame that it caused the men from Lucky to rise from the table and turn their backs on the ad team.
They marched to the door, clearly thinking about hiring a new agency, one that still knew how to sell a pack of smokes.
And then, it happened. A thunderbolt of inspiration. As the tobacco boys were about to leave, Don, the ace creative director resuscitated the conversation, positioning himself to toss a Hail Mary from deep in their end of the field.
The campaign that would infect a million lungs was born.
Don Draper: This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?
Lee Garner, Jr.: I don’t know.
Lee Garner, Sr.: Shame on you. We breed insect-repellent tobacco seeds, plant ’em in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it.
Don: There you go. There you go. Lucky Strike. It’s Toasted.
Lee Garner, Jr.: But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted.
Don: No, everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s is toasted.
ESG is like cigarettes were in the 1950’s, a cancerous product marketed to have you believe its a healthy and virtuous alternative to dangerous, world-destroying capitalist strategies like, you know, the ones that have continually advanced civilization.
The difference is, there are no current government officials or agencies able or willing to stop the ESG charade, and in fact, many are 100% on board, because the ESG grifters have been empowered to force policy around social issues that the federal government legally cannot.
ESG is about money. Theirs, not yours, to be clear. You will be along for their profitable ride, and you may even make a few bucks, but sound investing isn’t the point. The point of ESG is about using your hard-earned money to advance somebody else’s social agenda. Those somebodies are called “stakeholders”.
ESG takes money from workaday shareholders, and through their transformative magic they transfer it to stakeholders. This is called wealth transfer. This should be called a crime.
Will ESG Reform Capitalism or Destroy it?
You see, capitalism works. It’s always worked. Millions upon millions of workaday American’s lives have been enriched by straight up capitalism. Why? Because they had the guts to put skin in the game. Their skin.
Shareholders have skin in the game. Stakeholders do not.
“Stakeholder” is a made up concept designed to separate you from your money.
Companies exist to benefit their shareholders, people who despite having no guarantees, still took the risk to capitalize the enterprises and industries that have industrialized and improved our planet. Shareholders have earned the right to increase their wealth by participating in risk taking and the capital formation process. Stakeholders have not.
If you have been conned into believing that companies can become more valuable and profitable by adhering to the strict limitations of ESG standards, increase value to the shareholders, and raise their own “social goodness” scores in the bargain, I’ve got this bridge I want you to see.
But Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, Larry Fink, Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard, and too many others, are all working together to advance “the greater good” by forcing ESG on an unsuspecting public. ESG is designed to infiltrate and control your existence, and you will pay a steep price if your own social goodness score remains too low.
ESG is no more about advancing the greater good than giving free cigarettes to ten year olds. It’s not about saving the world from the so-called ravages of climate change, and it exploits issues like race, gender and inclusion, using them as effective manipulations to achieve their real goal: the money.
Social issues, both real and imagined, have been reduced to sales blurbs, and many people will buy the lies in order to escape the shame and name calling if they don’t. You will be well to remember the sticks and stones philosophy.
ESG may possibly be one of the worst and most dangerous ideas to come from the global elites. It has become fashionable in recent decades for elites and other social warriors to label the industries they want to villainize as Big, like Big Oil or Big Auto or Big Meat. You will be well to remember ESG as Big Fraud.
ESG promoters are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and I apologize to the wolves for saying so. They are the bag men who will collect your hard earned money, launder it in their sea of sanctimonious platitudes, throw the stakeholders a few bones and laugh all the way to the banks they control.
ESG is not about having money do good.
ESG is about its hucksters making good money
The Heritage Foundation: Explaining the ESG Pushback
There’s a lot of talk about recession these days.
As of today, June 30, 2022, we are probably in a recession, based on the technical definition, which is two consecutive quarters where GDP growth is negative.
More importantly, it feels like we are in a recession.
With inflation at a forty year high (and still rising), mortgage rates on the rise, regular gas over $5 a gallon, homes selling at record highs, car prices through the roof, and food prices skyrocketing, it’s no wonder that a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs survey finds that 85% of Americans believe we are on the wrong track.
Yeah, you don’t have to wait for the numbers to feel like we are in a recession.
Nobody likes recessions, since they bring wage declines, unemployment, stock market corrections and a feeling of malaise and worry. Right, not pretty. Stuff happens, and so do recessions. But like spring follows winter, recessions are eventually followed by another phase of the CYCLE called recovery. That’s why its called a business CYCLE.
Business CYCLE phases include boom, slowdown, recession and recovery.
Boom times are marked by expansion of GDP. The workforce is growing, production is high, sales are soaring and paychecks are getting bigger.
But all good things come to their natural end, and soon we will slow down and then peak, and inflation (rising prices, weaker dollar) creeps in like a thief. GDP slows, sales drop off, demand wanes and pretty soon, we are in a recession, a period of economic decline that lasts at least two successive quarters. This can have long-lasting effect on wages, the stock market, and the population as a whole.
If things worsen from there, then we face a full on depression. Depression is to recession what a migraine is to a headache. If you are “analogy challenged,” a depression is a really, really bad recession. The Great Depression was the worst economic decline in the modern, industrialized world. A real character builder. It started with the 1929 stock market crash and lasted for ten years. Millions of people were wiped out. Depressions are not a frequent part of the CYCLE. Thank God.
How can we prevent recessions?
We don’t control the weather, we can’t prevent snow, and it’s the same with recessions.
However, even though recessions are part of the normal business CYCLE, the effects can be minimized. At times like this, our country’s leadership must exercise intelligent fiscal, monetary and energy policies for us to have a chance to make it to the other side unscathed. Today, 85% of American’s don’t believe that our current fiscal, monetary and energy policies forecast a bright future.
BUT…
But now is not the time to panic. Instead, take the time to prepare.
They say that in a recession, “cash is king.” No, it’s queen. Having a PLAN is king, just as you should for every phase of the CYCLE.
But to prepare for the recession phase, here are two handfuls of tips:
So, in summary, we are either in, or headed into a recession. The facts and clues are too persistent and too many to deny. But armed with this intelligence, talk with your advisor or planner and take the necessary steps to build a fortress around your finances.
Dimensional Fund Advisors posted an article on May 11 that every investor should read: Singled Out: Historical Performance of Individual Stocks.
The authors,Single stocks have a wide range of returns. Only about a fifth of stocks survive and outperform the market over 20-year periods.” The Exhibit 1 chart in the article tells the whole story.
That’s a stunner, and should cause you to evaluate what you want from your portfolios and how you are going to manage it based on your individual personal goals.
Stocks are the engines of personal wealth. No argument there, but the decision to own stocks brings up many more decisions that must be made before dropping your dollars into something you may not really understand. For instance: Which stocks? Which industries? What is the right time to buy? The right time to sell? Should it account for 1% of your portfolio or 100%? What research did you perform? Are you buying on a hunch? And so on, and so forth, and on and on and on.
Diversification is one of the best risk-management tools that an investor can use, that does not inhibit the ability to capture market returns over time. Its not a tool for those interested only in potentially outsized short-term gains; it is, however, THE tool for patient, thoughtful and serious investors.
And one of the simplest and most efficient ways to be the market and achieve proper diversification is to use low-cost exchange traded funds to build an effective long-term portfolio.
Read the full article here.
PS-WealthKeep is not affiliated with Dimensional Fund Advisors or the authors, and receives no affiliate fees for our readers accessing the article through the links provided.
The article by Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart, observes the steady growth of passive investing, and sees a time when passive investing overtakes active. That time is 2026, four years from now. In fact, “passive vehicles’ lead in the $11.6 trillion U.S. domestic equity-fund market will likely expand.” Read the whole article here.
And from Morningstar, “just 49% of the nearly 3,500 active funds we cover survived and outperformed their average passive counterpart in 2020.” So, a simple coin flip could have determined investment success or failure.
But that’s actually an improvement from 2001-2016, a fifteen year period when more than 90% of active managers did not outperform their benchmarks.
We can continue to site numbers that validate the massive inflows of money to passive funds and the massive outflows from actively managed funds, but no matter which way activists try to spin it, that giant sucking sound they hear is money in motion. Can you say, “bye-bye”?
You have to be very smart or very lucky to be a consistently good stock picker, but apparently the vast majority of managers are neither, which makes this final statistic all the more revealing: 100% of active managers make exorbitant wages. Sure, there are some standout active managers. Managers of distinction, you might say. Managers who earn every cent they’re paid. They bring home the alpha. But even they stumble. There is no surefire guaranteed way to make money every year in the markets. If there were, we would all be fabulously wealthy. Like those active managers.
But there is absolutely a surefire guaranteed way to not make less than the market every year.
What is this wonderful strategy called?
Go to the head of the class if you said “passive investing.”
Passive investing is a long term strategy to build personal wealth. It is the antithesis of stock picking. It’s more about “being the market” than beating the market. The emphasis is on employing the major themes of successful investing–asset allocation, diversification, asset location, reducing costs, low turnover, tax efficiency and so forth–rather than trying to do the seemingly impossible: consistently picking winners. The proverbial stopped clock may be right twice a day, but personal investors? Not so much.
With the surge in low cost options, particularly exchange traded funds, ETFs, index investing can help investors put more of their energy into working on building intelligent investor traits like self control and stripping their emotions out of their trades. Check out just some of the reasons why the passive approach using exchange traded funds is the superior way:
Active mutual funds and separately managed accounts are expensive, yet they often fail to deliver the goods. With costs ranging from 1.5% to 3% annually, often in addition to front end sales loads of up to 5% or more, managers simply fail to deliver returns on their “excess alpha” promises. This active option can be ten to more than thirty times more expensive than using simple market-tracking ETFs. Active funds are a very expensive way to lose money!
Diversification at many levels can be easily achieved with ETFs. Asset class level (stocks, bonds, alternatives); sub-asset class level (large cap, mid cap, small cap, domestic bonds, global bonds); geographic level (US, foreign, single country, regional), specific industry or broad sectors level (regional banks or finance, social media or tech, cyclical or non), and even alternative asset classes (gold and silver, real estate, agriculture and timber). There are virtually limitless ways to construct your highly personalized portfolio.
Stock picking is risky business. This is where ego and overconfidence often team up to give you a real good ass whooping! Instead, let the indices do the work for you. Decide which ETFs and allocation model will work for you and allow you to attain your money goals, while reducing overall portfolio risk.
Remember, bad things happen when you think you’re smarter than the stock market.
Unlike mutual funds, ETF investing allows you to make changes to your portfolio intraday, meaning you can buy and sell in the open markets just like you would an individual stock. Selling a mutual fund is like blindly pulling the trigger, having to wait until after the market closes to see what price you got. While we are not advocating frequent trading, there are those times you need to reduce or increase a position and lock in the price you want without having to trade blindly.
The markets are efficient, meaning that by the time you see a stock price, just about all known information has been priced into it. It is nearly impossible for you to be more informed than the market at any given point in time. So, BE the market, and never make less than the market. Efficient. Cheap. Good!
Find your zen and BE the market. Zen is about dropping illusion and seeing things as they are, without the distortion created by your own thoughts. Or worse, your emotions.
In taxable accounts, you want your earnings to be treated as long term capital gains. Period. You want to be the person who decides when you want to pay them. Period. Mutual Funds (you remember, that expensive, overactive, under-performing group of investments) have a very nasty habit of sending you an income tax bill, even when your fund is in the red. In other words, they pass the cap gains (even the more expensive short term ones) on to you, the shareholder, because they realized a gain in a given security, even though the entire portfolio is down. Unless the account is an IRA or ROTH, or some other tax-qualified account, I think this really sucks, but let me know if you think that’s a good idea.
Institutions love ETFs. Pension funds,insurance companies, endowments, hedge funds, money managers…all use ETFs in a greater and greater proportion every year, for all the reasons above, and more!
Finally, from a behavioral standpoint, if you adopt a passive mindset, meaning, you will set your ego aside, stay invested and take what the market gives you, and avoid the many temptations to try and beat the market (good luck) with constant buying and selling, your nest egg is more likely to become much larger and more stable over the long haul.
And that’s what really counts.
Money is deeply personal.
An individual’s unique emotional connections, experiences and values all help to shape their own personal relationship with money.
Financial coaches have the opportunity and responsibility to understand their client’s values, biases and behaviors, and make personal finance truly personal by encouraging clients to share their experiences and deepest concerns, especially when they relate to their financial circumstances.
It is these priorities that make it incumbent on the coach to connect with clients emotionally, and earn genuine trust to be able to identify, understand and collaborate on achieving their client’s goals, in other words, the things that matter most in life.
Coaching models, coaching methods, coaching skills and coaching experience all vary from coach to coach, however every coach must endeavor to help their client contemplate how reaching their financial goals will improve their lives. Coaches must help clients believe that a more financially rewarding life is not beyond their grasp.
Building trust, sharing values, making an emotional connection, enjoying the benefits of collaboration are all keys to a successful coaching relationship, however, none of it matters unless and until the client takes action.
Action is make or break.
Helping clients attain their desired quality of life through helping them understand their behaviors, overcome inertia and hurdle their roadblocks is the coach’s highest and best value.
When the elements of empathy, understanding, curiosity, and open communication are combined with the coach’s technical financial expertise and ability to motivate the client to take action are all present, then the client should feel they are in the ideal environment to confidently take the required steps toward meaningful, life-changing action.
This man is on a mission to help everyday investors build unstoppable wealth and prosperity.
I’ve been watching Charles Payne on the Fox Business channel for many years, and to say that I trust the things he says is an understatement. Charles is high knowledge, high credibility, and no BS. And for bonus points, he’s a snappy dresser.
So when he announced the release of his book, Unstoppable Prosperity (Paradigm Direct LLC, 2019), I knew it was just a matter of time until a copy would be on my shelves. Well, I got the book, and Mr. Payne has lived up to everything I believe about him, and then some.
The book is organized into ten tight chapters, high on stuff, light on fluff. Its written in direct and clear language so that novice and veteran investors, and even professional money people will learn from it.
The subtitle nails the premise: Learn the strategy I’ve used for years to beat the market. Full disclosure, if you search the term “beat the market” in this website, you find an abundance of reasons that most people will be better off in the long run if they index their portfolio, and do not attempt to beat the market.
So, do I disagree that individual investors can beat the market? No, I do believe most people will not beat the market because of their own biases and behaviors. The operative word is “most.”
So who beats the market? Usually people that have gotten their biases and behaviors under control, and do not approach the markets, or run from them, emotionally.
In fact, in chapter four, Behaviorals: Managing the Moods of the Market, Charles addresses that very subject head on. “It’s one thing to be the master of your own emotions and avoid self-sabotage in your investing efforts,” he writes, “but its something entirely different to weather the storm when everyone else seems to be losing their collective minds.”
I believe that Behaviorals is the foundation that the rest of his work is built upon, and the rest of his work is as robust as the big man himself: Fundamental analysis, technical analysis, building and managing portfolios, a rather detailed section on classic mistakes that investors make, and finally a capstone chapter about putting it all together and into action.
And to close this brief report, allow me to close with a smart money tip: Go to this link and get the book and additional goodies for free (pay shipping cost only).
(Note #1: its February 18, 2022 and I don’t know how long this offer will be available)
(Note #2: I receive absolutely no referral fees or affiliate income from recommending this book…I like it that much!)
The Federal Reserve is about to raise interests rates in a very meaningful way. They are a bit late to the party, in my humble opinion. Finally, 2022 will be the year of fighting back on inflation by using a more aggressive monetary policy, that is, raising interest rates.
So what now? Don’t panic. Prepare.So, in summary, while it is always good to plan ahead with your money, it especially important when rates are rising and inflation is literally stealing money from you with every transaction you make. Start today and build solid habits that will prepare you for every phase of the business cycle.