I think this market is irrational and I’m putting my money where my thoughts are. I just moved all of my 401k into government securities and I sold more than half of my travel related stocks.
Nobody cares about my situation but feel free to make fun of me if the Dow climbs higher before Inauguration Day.
I definitely agree with selling travel stocks.
There is going to be a small window when holding those will be smart, but to guess that would be longer odds than the lottery,
Not to pat myself on the back too much but I added airlines, cruise lines, and oil at their 5 year lows in mid-March. Not to make light of it but Covid has had one upside for me.
Stocks are long term investments. Travel will be bad in the short term. No reason to think so for the long term.
I’ve changed nothing other than investing more. I spread my accounts out over several funds to diversify, no individual stocks.
While I’m all for the long haul, that was likely a good move on the travel stocks. I think they are a couple of years away from what the travel business was in 2019. Although, your gains after 8 months will be short term and taxed as ordinary income.
Coming into this year, we had a number of individual stocks. But, I sold them in January, and more in September (all long term). Verizon is the only individual stock we now own. The proceeds went into preferreds (which we will hold for some time), bond funds and munis. We pretty much sat on our IRAs, which are all a variety of funds, selling enough to take 2021 RMDs without having to sell if the market goes down.
While I agree the market is over valued, if another $1200 check drops, it will soar again. There will be a flood of buyers that will push it up again. This is based on no fundamental investing but just the average guy that like xzy company will put their chips on that stock. I am half in and half out. I rebalanced about a week ago. The thing is so many jobs are gone for a long a time. Many more likely to disappear. The health of the stock market and the health of the economy are severely disconnected. No amount of stimulus can solve this. People have so much fear that they will still not return to normal for a while.
Good move, my retirement money is never exposed to a handful of stock or a few sectors. I bought some travel stocks just to play with, was always meant to be short term stuff.
I was waiting for this to lighten up on stocks but with good vaccine news that makes it more unlikely we’ll see a stimulus in trillion dollar range. Like I said, I’m no investing genius and I could be costing myself by selling now.
I miss the extreme confidence with which people used to declare Bitcoin dead as a dinosaur.
Their confidence (arrogance) was through the roof when the price had fallen down to $3,000.
Now that it’s dusting its previous high, they’re shockingly quiet.
I did a several hour long CPE on bitcoin yesterday. I get the idea behind it but it still cannot stand on its own. You must convert your bitcoin to fiat currency to buy nearly everything. You need to convert you bitcoin to USD to pay your electric bill that powers the computers. I almost sold a gun several years ago for bitcoin. It would have been 1.5 bitcoins worth $600 USD but today would be worth $28,500.
I don’t know the likelihood of a 51% attack but that sounds plausible.
I will hopefully get a tour of a new bitcoin mining farm soon.
Call me old fashioned but I’m completely out on bitcoin. I’ve got friends buying goofy stocks that have had a 300% bump in the last few days, I’m out on those too.
Correct. But don’t assume that means it never will.
The millions of techs & engineers working on this global consensus project are not doing so on a flimsy empty hope running on 11 years.
A 51% attack is possible, just like anything is possible, but not a sustained one. The problematic nodes would all be easily identifiable, & the remainder of the consensus network would clip them out, fork, & move along.
Thinking imaginatively & exponentially is not something people are used to doing. Inertia bias & status quo preference are much more common. As I’ve said in the past, no one thought the internet could serve in its current role in economics, politics, & information. People called the Wright Brothers insane. The automobile was never expected to replace the horse & buggy. Etc.
I’ve been rebalancing toward more conservative in our Vanguard holdings with some of the bigger bumps in the S&P 500 over past 6 months. Down to around 35% stocks now rather than 65%. Call be Chicken Little, but I have a bit of fear of where the economy will go in the new year if Mitch and the Senate keep squeezing economy with the continued skinny proposal for aid during the worst of the pandemic.
[quote=“sgtFriday, post:14, topic:4652, full:true”]Call be Chicken Little, but I have a bit of fear of where the economy will go in the new year if Mitch and the Senate keep squeezing economy with the continued skinny proposal for aid during the worst of the pandemic.
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Personally I think the country doesn’t need more stimulus but I certainly wouldn’t mind the bump it provides my remaining holdings if it happens. If the fundamentals remain solid, Q2 and Q3 will be big quarters.
You may not, and neither do I, but a lot of folks who were thrown out of low wage jobs back in the spring and are set to see most if not all their unemployment bennies expire certainly do. And those folks and families are in the 10-15s millions. And the small businesses who went belly-up are on the verge of doing so certainly need the bump, big time. 500 billion that Mitch is supporting isn’t even a drop in the bucket of what’s needed.
It’s gonna suck for many but I’m not sure if stimulus helps these people or just boosts the stock market.
The monetary stimulus provided by the fed, extremely low interest rates, are great for large corporations and a boon to the stock market. Not much for folks out of work, etc. They don’t generally increase spending. Fiscal and needs to come from congress. The interest rates are near zero so they are short on further ammo at this point. The Fed chairman is literally begging at this point for help from Congress to pump more spending money into the economy.
They were to help avoid people being out of work. That’s why they had to keep them on staff to get the money.
I can agree with this. Hundreds of small businesses here are done. Local businesses, especially restaurants, are not going to come back. Interview last night with the owner of what was a 10 restaurant business with near 1,500 employees. He’s permanently shuttered 4 restaurants and is down to about 800 employees. He and his employees put their hearts and souls in the 25 year old business and they are deperately hanging on. After many months, our governor has finally woken up to the fact that her shutdowns are killing the economy. Last I heard, the state legislature was putting together their own state stimulus package. My suspicion is that it may be too little too late.
