Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Personal Finance, Economics and Investing

My friend sent me an article the other day which really summarized my thoughts succinctly – he sent me this piece from Evan Newmark writing at the Wall Street Journal. If you haven’t noticed the crazy action in the stock market in recent weeks and days, let me be the bearer of bad news: the major US indicators are down from their yearly peaks. You’ve probably lost some money on paper, even. Between oil in the Gulf, the Greece Drama, and even North Korea, there is a lot to be worried about. Here’s the thing – these are all known unknowns, and generally priced into the stock market already.

One of the more interesting risks you’ll face in investing in stocks (or bonds, or any security of a single company for that matter) is headline risk. Headline risk, as you may know, is the effect that news can have on a company (or sector, etc.). Often times, negative news which is only loosely related to a company can hurt it negatively. Of recent note: Tiger Woods’s “transgressions” on the companies that pay him to sponsor their products.

What should you make about the Mark Hulbert article claiming that top market timing newsletters are bullish heading into the new year? After a 27.76% increase in the value of the S&P 500 (not counting dividends) in 2009, how much further does the stock market yet have to run? And what does a bullish consensus among market timers mean, exactly?

Yesterday saw a 1.45% rise in the value of the S&P 500 Index and a 1.33% rise in the Dow. The closely followed indexes have been strong in November, rising 5.53% and 5.09% respectively. However, they are being boosted by a weird trend – the outperformance of large cap stocks.

Or is it? The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 2.03% yesterday, on the surface a nice gain for the index. Rises such as that give confidence to investors that the worst is over and it’s time to work back into stocks. Let me briefly present the other side of that argument.

Who is your favorite investor? Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch? Do you wish you had their insights? What if you could link your brokerage account to theirs? That exact concept is brought up in an article from the New York Times hosted on Yahoo! Finance: for a fee, your brokerage account can mirror that of an expert investor.

Of note: an interesting report from Cumberland Advisors. An ETF that tracks the KBW Banking Index is up a whopping 145% since March 9. It consists mainly of bigger, national banks. With their ‘bigness’ also comes ‘too big to fail-ness’ and political connections. Smaller, regional banks are a totally different story.

How accurately can the stock market (as modeled by the S&P 500 Index) predict future recessions? If one charts the S&P 500 over the years and marks when recessions begin, is there any indication that the market senses it early? How accurate are the predictions? Can the market be used to prepare for downfalls? In short: somewhat, yes, very, probably not.

What better way to start writing again (Happy October!) then to write about an investing fallacy: over periods of 20 years or longer, many investors automatically assume that stocks are the best investment. Really, it isn’t fair. Stocks have behaved (before this decade anyway) in such a controlled fashion, gaining 10% or so on average every year, that it is only natural for many investors to assume that this trend will continue. Well, as Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal makes clear, that isn’t the case.

No way. According to this Wall Street Journal article, individual investors are responsible for $120 billion in currency trades per day. Sure, the total volume of currency trades is somewhere around $4 trillion, but individual participation in Foreign Exchange (or FX, or ForEx) markets has definitely climbed. Let me just say: Caveat Emptor.