Tag Archives: jason kelly

Investing, Social comment, Technology

Doing what we are told–or not

4 Comments

While this won’t see publication until mid-December 2020, and I admit it doesn’t have much to do with editing services, I wonder if there are others out there who think as I do. I write on November 30, at the height of what we are told is Cyber Monday.

For the US readership, and those of any other country with a lot of Christmas gift-giving, did you buy anything online today? I did not. Were you tempted? But how could I resist the bargains, bargains, bargains? I was not even tempted.

I’d be interested in knowing if anyone else is as cynical about commerce. My starting presumption was/is that the designation of this as A Very Special Commercial Day was an attempt to manipulate the herd into overspending. The logic goes: “Better hurry, or other people will get all our Very Great Deals.” I assume it’s all smoke and mirrors; that they just raised prices and then marked them down, like our grocery stores do; that it’s a con job.

Black Friday, as it has been designated in order to make it Another Very Special Commercial Day, held even less attraction for me–and had done so in the many years before the pandemic turned large gatherings into superspreader events full of maskholes. “But you won’t get all the good deals!” Oh, I bet most of them aren’t so good. I don’t resent the marketing industry for presuming that the public is stupid, because for the most part the industry is correct when the public is taken as a mass. I probably should, but I do not. After cracking a couple of Black Fridays Matter jokes with my wife–and reflecting on the unfortunate impact of language choices on perceptions–I stayed home and watched college football.

The point, I guess, is that the Designation of the Very Special Commercial Days by itself was enough to turn me off. It triggered automatic assumptions that following a large crowd would lead to me spending money I should not, spending more money than necessary for anything I might want, and jostling around arterial streets and stores or the online ordering platforms.

It was that way with Amazon Prime as well. Remember when that came out? To me, it seemed obvious that Amazon would not do this unless they expected it would draw people to spend money with them more often than they should, just to “take advantage.” I took one look and said: “What is to your advantage will occur at my expense. No thanks.” Am I the only person who sees it this way? I just saw an American corporation pitching a gimmick, assumed it was screwery, and moved along.

The same applies to investing. On any given day, one can read a ton of articles about Some Intensely Important Indicator having made a critical shift: a Death Cross, an Inverted Yield Curve, a 50-Day Moving Average, or some other bit of technical talk. About half the time it warns us that we should sell, sell, sell, in order to avoid losing money. The other half is spent telling us now is the time to buy, buy, buy or miss the boat. Each side is right about 50% of the time, which poses a greater problem than people generally realize because in order to achieve an outperforming capital gain, one generally has to be right twice (timing of buying and selling). No wonder people just buy index ETFs.

Speaking of which, if you want a very effective strategy for cutting out all that racket and ignoring the Cassandras and Candides of our precious financial media, seriously consider subscribing to Jason Kelly’s financial newsletter. It is not cheap, but if you are managing five figures or more of assets, you should earn enough on dividends alone to wipe out the cost. It is entertaining, consistent, and often supplemented with midweek issues that comment on major movements. I can also verify from our business dealings and contacts that Jason maintains the highest possible standards of integrity and value. Time and again I have seen him lean to the side of making sure people are fully informed, well updated, and well supported. That’s not true of every financial newsletter out there, something I paid a lot of tuition (in the form of dumb investing decisions) to learn. Jason takes care of his people.

Unlike most of the money wonks on MarketWatch, Jason can write entertaining English with a dry wit. I go back to the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and Jason (who lives in Japan), decided to seek sock donations to give to refugees. There’s always some negatory type who could find fault with free beer or a form of cheesecake that causes weight loss, and sure enough, one of them wrote in to question Jason’s qualifications to operate this process. With elaborate tact and patience, Jason reviewed what was required: use platform to request socks from community, assemble socks once arrived, load in van, take to refugee centers. Approximate quote: ‘Do I think I’m qualified to put socks in a van and give them to people? Yes, I think I’m qualified to do that.’ One of the highlights of my week is watching him point out what’s wrong with what the financial media are currently saying.

Of course, Jason’s guidance doesn’t tell people to do what most of the media are stirring them to do. That might be the greatest part of its early appeal to me. His method radiates indifference toward mass manipulation efforts.

Good holidays to all you who are observing holidays. Good fun to those who are just having fun. And great fun to all my fellow nonconformists; you aren’t the only ones.

Advertisement
Book reviews, Investing, Social comment

lighting a financial candle rather than cursing the financial darkness

Leave a comment

Now and then, I have to give credit to a complete idiot.

Dirty laundry: I sometimes have trouble coming up with good topics to maintain a twice-monthly blog posting schedule. In this case, a friend’s friend said something so blithering that I had to contradict. Not harshly, of course. You never know when it’s someone’s wonderful Aunt Edna who, while dumber than a bag of wet nickels, has devoted her whole life to helping her nephew and about two hundred other kids from broken homes. I’d rather not find out the hard way. But the facts, at least, needed a saying.

This brought me to the realization that I have a substantial financial reading list, if I would but share it, to help people self-educate. Self-education is good. Why take my word for this stuff? Better to read people who know more about it than I do. And another of my beliefs is the old saying about lighting candles and cursing darkness. If I don’t feel good, I try to make myself do things that will make me feel more positive.

Before I go into the reading list, I ought to disclose my basic investing outlook and methods. I am not a fan of corporate America. I begin with the presumption that it is impossible to find a publicly traded American company not operated by criminals, at least as I define the term. The harder a company puts on the PR to tell me how wonderful it is, the more I assume the reality is opposite.

I am more an income investor than a growth investor. I don’t like CEO promises and predictions; my basic outlook is “Fuck you; pay up.” I like income because they can’t take it back. I own very few separate issue stocks. I go mostly for index ETFs (exchange-traded funds) and closed-end bond funds (CEFs). I can wring 2-5% payouts from the bond index ETFs, 12-15% from the CEFs (with capital loss potential), and results from the stock ETFs vary but are more volatile than most of the market (this works to my advantage). My primary objective, naturally, is to make money. The secondary objective, which leads to the primary but has to come first, is to keep emotion out of my investing.

It follows, therefore, that I don’t much believe in ethical investing. If you want to get all ethical, buy Satan Inc.’s stock (DEVL), donate the dividends to their enemies, and vote against all management’s recommendations. That is the action on your part that they fear most–but don’t confuse it with investing for gain.

I do believe that financial innumeracy is one of the leading causes of youth poverty in this country. The schools and parents didn’t teach them. The young made the naive assumption that opportunities would be the same for them as they were for their parents, a myth their parents knew was bullshit, but did not puncture. The parents should have.

With that, I offer you a list of excellent reads about money management, investing behaviors, strategies, and suchlike. I hope it will help you beat the rigged game that is our market, even if your method doesn’t even involve buying any stocks.

  • Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere; Don’t Be One of Them, by Jason Kelly. You’ll be seeing his name a couple more times, for good reason: Jason combines a very readable style with an iconoclastic, no-bullshit approach. We’re friends, but I was a fan of his writing years before we became personally acquainted. If adulting classes existed, this could be the textbook. If you’re in your twenties and you have debt and/or no savings, start here. It’s the icewater bath you need.
  • Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl, and Why You Should, Too, by Louann Lofton. It turns out that women have investing tendencies that work to their advantage, and Lofton has taken time to observe and quantify these. It’s an excellent read, and likely to promote confidence on the part of women navigating what has historically been a male-dominated industry. Bottom line: if you’re beating their numbers, it doesn’t matter whether you do it through newsletter picks, tarot, Sacred Vagina Meditations, research, or free association. It means you’re better.
  • The Motley Fool Investment Guide, by David & Tom Gardner. While I’m out of the business of researching and picking separate issue securities (that would include common stocks), others might not be. Either way, this is a fun read full of helpful education.
  • Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), by William Poundstone. Poundstone is the guy you have never read that you should be reading: author of the Secrets books, who then turned to studies of human psychology. Distilled essence: marketers use our instincts to lead us to decisions that work to their advantage and against ours. Understanding this is worth your while.
  • The 3% Signal: The Investing Technique that will Change Your Life, by Jason Kelly. Jason publishes The Kelly Letter, an outstanding investment newsletter. He used to pick stocks. He stopped, and his life got better. This book tells what he does now, and how anyone with an investment account can do the same. Five stars without a moment’s hesitation.
  • Your Money & Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich, by Jason Zweig. Another good entry in the field of investing and money psychology. I don’t believe you can go too far wrong applying critical thinking to an understanding of how our minds work.
  • The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing, by Jason Kelly. There is some overlap here between more recent versions of this book and The 3% Signal. That said, if you want to go stock hunting, I’d take this book in addition to the Gardners’ treatise.

Because I feel in a sharing mode, I’m going to make a number of statements that I wish more people could absorb:

  • Any stock index report that goes by points rather than percentage change just makes you dumber.
  • Any person reporting a stock index result that reports points rather than percentage is either too uneducated to know how dumb this is, or is deliberately using the big number to draw attention.
  • Conventional open-end mutual funds are usually a bad deal. They’re great investments for 1975, if you’re currently living then.
  • About 90-95% of investors should just buy and accumulate index ETFs (exchange-traded funds).
  • Financial media suck. You get stupider every time you watch or read them.
  • Bonds don’t automatically mean you get your money back. Bond funds especially don’t mean this.
  • If investing a very small amount, you can afford to shoot high. Only when you pile up a big heap o’ money do you have to think about holding onto it.
  • Emotion is your investing enemy.
  • You don’t know who you are as an investor until you see a crash. Who you are is what you do during and after that crash. A fern could make money in a bull market.
  • The Dow is worse than useless; it is distortive. Any time someone cites it as meaningful, my opinion of that person’s investing savvy drops.
  • It follows, from the above and previous commentary, that any time anyone says “Dow drops 300 [or whatever number],” without including the percentage change, I conclude that the individual doesn’t understand the markets at all. I may heart them big time, but they said a dumb thing.
  • Most people throw away about half their lifetime returns just by playing with themselves all through their twenties, only getting serious come their thirties.
  • If you buy an investment you don’t understand, you do a stupid thing.
  • Any time someone starts by saying “If you had bought XX back in X month, year Y,” this person is sharing irrelevancy. Why? Because you didn’t. You wouldn’t. Next time, you won’t either. If only that defensive end had gotten to the passer on that third down play in the first quarter, the whole game would have been different–but he did not.
  • Always buy the stocks my wife says to buy. Unless, of course, I helped pick them, in which case they’ll tank.
  • The choice of a traditional vs. Roth IRA comes down to the tax benefit. If you don’t make enough money to need the writeoff, the Roth is probably more advantageous. However, the Roth means trusting the government to honor a promise years in the future. I never have. Your call.
  • Rich traders get to cheat in ways you and I do not.
  • For IPOs, if they’re worth getting into, you probably aren’t getting in unless you’re with a big full-commission brokerage. That’s one advantage for full-commission brokers, set against an ocean of disadvantages.
Book reviews

Excellent books you may not even know exist

Leave a comment

Other day, I was sitting out with a cigar and a book about how to avoid speeding tickets. It was insightful and well worth the re-read. It occurred to me that I had read a number of such books, profited from what I’d learned, yet never shared these hidden gems with you all.

That’s no way to treat all the nice people who take the time to read my blog.

What these all have in common: they all conveyed to me some form of important understanding, be it practical, geopolitical, financial, historical, whatever. After reading them, I felt more like a motorboat and less like an inner tube on the choppy waters of life.

Eagan, James: A Speeder’s Guide to Avoiding Tickets. It’s not that I habitually speed, because I do not. It’s that if by chance the police are thinking about stopping me, I hope they won’t, and if they do, I hope they won’t give me a ticket. Some of the technological tips may be dated, but I doubt that the insights into police mentality and habits are obsolete. This twenty-year veteran of the New York State Police got his most helpful possible endorsement when some police-connected official condemned the book. If the police do not want you to read it, obviously, it’s the first thing you should be reading.

Poundstone, William: Big Secrets. Poundstone, an investigative reporter and student of the human mind, dug into many subjects such as Freemasonry initiations, Colonel Sanders’s recipe, and all those supposed backward messages in records. (For those, he rented a studio and split the tracks, playing them both forward and backward.) It is a bit dated, but very interesting and mostly remains relevant. There are two sequels, with no decline in interest level or quality.

Kelly, Jason: The 3% Signal. Most of you who invest are still either picking your own stocks or paying expensive professionals (to underperform more often than not) through conventional mutual funds. The evidence is in, and it says most of you are doing this wrong. Kelly is a very interesting fellow, a Colorado Buff English major who lives in Japan and writes a financial newsletter. Not only does he write well, his market insight is spot on and his investing plan is so simple that even a self-declared financial boob could probably handle it. I’ve been using it for three years and it has made me feel much better about my investing methods.

Anderson, Kurt: How to Back up a Trailer…and 101 Other Things Every Real Guy Should Know. Anderson is that guy we all need to know. He’s like my father, who could have taught me all this stuff had I shown the slightest bit of interest, had I not been practicing the development method of “ignore adulthood and hope it will never arrive.” Unlike many who are gifted in the area of life’s physics, Anderson can write and never comes off as a horse’s ass about it all. The irony, of course, is that the people who should rush out to buy this book are majority female. Girls and women aren’t taught enough of this in life, especially growing up in cities (whereas your average farm girl could have written this book), and capability equals independence. Anderson’s book is their liberator.

Cahill, Tim: A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg. A world in which Bill Bryson sells more books than Tim Cahill is a world with lousy taste, a world that lets people with vested financial interests tell it what to like. The travel genre has many subsets, and one of my favorites is adventure travel. Cahill, a Sconnie now living in Montana, has a laconic descriptive method that knows how to let the humor speak for itself. Unlike some travel writers, he also seems like a man who could safely go back to most of his adventuresome haunts. One of the nicest things my bro John ever did was give me a copy of this book, which opened the way to the other seven-odd Cahill travel books.

Loewen, James W.: Sundown Towns. Prof. Loewen’s name is better known for his studies of mendacious monuments, but I consider this his most important work because it answers a question about how African Americans came to be concentrated in cities. It explains the difference between Southern and Northern post-Civil War racisms. As someone who used to live in a former sundown town (Kennewick, WA, which has never come to terms with this racist past and has instead chosen to avoid the conversation as the eyewitnesses die off), this book supplied a crucial lack in my understanding of American history. If we are ever to repair this ongoing rent in the national fabric, we must arrive at that understanding.

Horwitz, Tony: Baghdad Without a Map. It’s hard to pick a favorite book with authors who always do it right. In cases like these, I choose the one that first drew me in. Horwitz may be best known for Confederates in the Attic, his study of Civil War re-enactor culture, but a Jew traveling all over the greater Middle Eastern region shows me serious chutzpah. Like Cahill, Horwitz knows how to let the reader find the humor. All his books are good, including his historical take on John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry seizure, Midnight Rising. I find him an exception to the rule that journalists should be kicked in the groin if they start making moves toward writing history books. (“But I checked three sources! I can write it!”)

Perkins, John: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. When you look at a globe, you may not see the strings by which the United States manipulates the world. Perkins explains how we weave them, how we reeve them, and how we yank them to make less fortunate countries do our bidding. If you’ve ever watched a documentary about how drug dealers work hard to develop new addicts because addicts are customers and can be controlled through their addictions, this book will show you how effective (if heartless) that business model can be on a larger scale.

Eskeldson, Mark: What Car Dealers Don’t Want You to Know. The fine art of screwing the auto-purchasing public is an evolutionary game, so books will tend to become dated. So is this one, but much of its content is still relevant. The essential lesson is that the process of buying a car is a three-card monte game with the dealer making a cameo. An updated version for the Internet buying era would be especially helpful, but no matter the timeframe, the fundamental mentality does not change; when it proclaims itself kinder, honest, and forthright, that is when it is the sleaziest. Car dealers hate when you are not forthright with them because deceit is supposed to be their playground. Definitely a good guide to how they think.

Sullivan, Bob: Stop Getting Ripped Off. I’d like to give a copy to every young person graduating from high school. Thanks to the time value of money combined with ignorance and naïveté, the first twenty years of independence are when the mistakes are likeliest to be costly when all is calculated with eyes wide open. One must learn to be one’s own advocate, and that advocacy must evolve, because what worked for your mom and stepdad may no longer be feasible for you. While the title is a bit misleading, at least in the body of the book Sullivan admits that there are areas where you are going to be ripped off and cannot stop the process. My view: at least if you know what the ripoff is and who does it, you’ll know who to hate.

Molloy, John T.: Molloy’s Live for Success. Okay, so you want to get ahead in the office/corporate world, but you don’t have the right connections, the right personality, the right clothes, the right vibe. You keep wondering why lazy, stupid assholes get promoted and you do not, in spite of your competent diligence. This resentment builds on itself, because you are an honest hard worker who tries hard to get along with others and go the extra mile, thus worsening the gap between you and success. That resentment hits close to my home, because the dawning of reality shortened my naïve, selectively brilliant, industrious father’s life. It would have shortened mine too, except that I decided I didn’t want that type of career. But if I had–if I’d been willing to subordinate my basic identity to a perfectly manufactured persona that kissed the right butts, appeared at the right places, and otherwise gave off the vibe of being a club member–at least I would have had the right textbook. I read it in my early twenties and it helped me to decide that I wasn’t the type to reach the executive suite. It helped me to understand the warm, affectionate, grandfatherly smile of the Sears executive whom I am certain vetoed their hire of me (a great kindness, now that I understand the world better). But if you are that type, the only things that have changed are the technologies and clothes. Even if you are not, if you work for a hierarchy, reading this will help you understand how that hierarchy got where it is (and why, at the rate you’re going, you aren’t getting a slot in it unless you are already slotted by genetics and upbringing to join it). Molloy is much better known for his Dress for Success books, but this is the book that will enumerate the rest of the entry fee.

Happy reading.

Investing

Old friends, and an investing epiphany

Leave a comment

Live long enough, and even the somewhat socially awkward will accumulate a network of old friends with decades of experience in various fields. This is great for getting answers. When I have a question about physical science, I can contact a professor of physical science. Question about U.S. military history? I’m fortunate enough to know someone who teaches it at the collegiate level. Want to understand how a given firearm works? I can choose from multiple enthusiasts, none of whom need any encouragement beyond a hint of interest. Need an antique valued? One of the best men at my wedding has been in the business for thirty years. Question about the workings of a suburban police department? How about the deputy commander of a well-respected suburban police force? Real estate? In addition to agents I’ve worked with in three states, I could also call a friend and past client who made his career in the field. My uncle is a civil engineer, one cousin a retired petroleum chemist, another cousin a speech therapist, and so on.

The question is not whether one can locate the expertise, but whether one may fairly impose upon the friend. I’m not unique in this, nor even above the curve. I have this only because I lived to my mid-fifties without spending it all in a shack somewhere out near Glenallen, Alaska. Everyone else my age, except those who live in shacks near Glenallen, has at least as great a network. Those who got out more than I did probably have far greater networks, but I’m very satisfied with my folks. I wouldn’t trade any of you.

For them, it follows, I’m the old friend who edits. When they begin to consider doing some writing, it is quite natural that they ask me about it. I’m glad, because gods know I’ve bugged all of them often enough about this or that. If it comes to an actual project I’ll charge something, but advice is always free to old friends. Truth told, I don’t mind a bit. It’s rather nice that people would think I could help them understand something.

One old friend of mine is named Randy, and with some admitted contact gaps, we’ve known each other since college. Randy retired as a stockbroker with one of the big brokerages, and while in most people that might not mean as much, I’ve always known him as a maverick immune to peer pressure where he knows he is right. That tends to be true of me as well, so I found it easy to believe that he had knowledge and instincts on behalf of his clients that the average full-commission broker might not have had. Put another way, there aren’t very many such brokers I’d have steered anyone toward, but Randy would be the one.

Not long ago, Randy and I had a long conversation about investing. We agree in substance, especially in matters such as that people should remain within their comfort/knowledge zones. I told him I no longer buy separate issue securities, because while it’s possible I could develop the knowledge to do well at it, I know that I will not, and thus shouldn’t fool myself. I received a precious pearl of approval, which I will have set into a suitable mounting in a place of honor.

Maybe it’ll distract everyone from all the little tombstones representing my dumber investing mistakes.

While schooling me, Randy crystallized a realization that explains so very much: winning vs. losing, and the arithmetic. The instinct and habit is to look at an investing choice as one decision, to get right or wrong. It isn’t. Most investing decisions are based on some stated goal, even one as nebulous as “make money.” There are two decisions to make, and for an investment to meet or exceed expectations, both decisions must be right. There is the decision to buy (when/what/how much), and the decision to sell (when/how much) or hold (some or all). That’s a thing to consider: not to sell is also a decision.

If you are wrong 50% of the time, you will probably like your results 25% of the time because that represents the percentage of the time you will do what in hindsight turned out to be the right thing both times. That means that two times out of four you will likely be disappointed, and once out of four, you’ll probably take a straight-on bath.

If you are right 60% of the time, you will get satisfactory results 36% of the time, same reason. You are taking a hosing. About half the time, you will get one decision or the other wrong, with disappointing results. You’ll go splat big time about one time in six.

If you are right 70% of the time, all other factors being equal, you should be happy 49% of the time. You are still losing, though not by much. Slightly less often, one decision or the other will be wrong enough to disappoint. About once in ten, the disappointment will be great.

You have to be right just over 70% of the time just to be pleased more often than not. If you can arrange to be right 75% of the time, you will get a favorable result about 57% of the time. Not many people are that good. I’m not even close.

In the meantime, of course, the overall market does whatever it does. Goals can vary, as can strategies. This is a rabbit hole of exceptions, and I have felt the need to oversimplify this (yes, I am aware I am doing so), but the key takeaway is that there are two opportunities, not one, to screw up a given investment. A mistake in either case will probably cause disappointment.

Thus: even then, even being right three-quarters of the time, you’re pretty happy just slightly more often than not. Enough to matter, of course; enough to be meritorious, and definitely enough to offer a shot at outperformance over time. Your good decisions should outweigh your bad ones. And I guess if you are confident enough to feel you will be right 75% of the time, you probably should carry that through.

The minority of people who can achieve that success is small indeed. I have learned that I am not one. Many of the rest are more or less playing the slots in a different format. Whenever I find myself tempted, nowadays, I remind myself how much I despise gambling, and ask myself whether those glitzy casinos were built with the money people won. I suppose it’s like a former smoker who, when tempted to lapse, looks at graphic images of cancerous lung tissue: if that helps, go ahead.

And how often does one get to make an analogy between casinos and cancerous tissue? You’re very welcome.

For the rest of us, it’s buy and hold index ETFs all the way. We will generally not outperform, but we will get the market return less (very bearable) expenses. Even Jason Kelly, a noteworthy author and manager who has an excellent track record with stocks, has shifted entirely to a mechanistic method involving index ETFs. I’ve been running it in two different portfolios now for a couple of years, and I think it stands a good chance of outperforming because it takes the emotion out of the decision. The only free choice one makes is when to add more cash to the plan. From there, the entire course of events can be handled with a pretty simple spreadsheet and two trades per quarter per portfolio. You can learn more from his book on the topic.

Jason’s writing is entertaining and straightforward. My favorite part is the way he begins by politely butchering out the pundits who bray frequent predictions for which they are never held to account. It’s hard to imagine they can even keep writing, much harder to imagine anyone still wasting time on them, after Jason hits them with the literary equivalent of a fire hose loaded with ice water. He calls them “z-vals,” as in “zero validity,” and when he’s done with them they look like Leroy Brown at the end of the famous song.

You want to hate the media? Don’t hate the ones who are trying to tell you what has happened around the country and world. Start with the mainstream financial media, because they have hate coming. They get to tell you what will happen, be wrong on a consistent basis, and never suffer. They don’t even lose readers. Were you able to confront one, he (most of them are men; for some reason, it appears harder to find intellectually dishonest women) would tell you that doing your own research was your problem, and not to blame him. “If you believed me, it’s not my fault you were that big an idiot.”

Even the salesiest full-commission broker at Merrill Lynch has more accountability than that.

As for me, if I have to be right three-quarters of the time in order to do well, maybe I’d better keep my decisions in the comfort zone.

Investing

The financial education millennials aren’t getting

Leave a comment

And I find it appalling, but not surprising. Ours was not much better. However, we should have done better by the next generation, and as in all other matters of managing society, we did not. So I’m donating time to fix this by explaining the whole reasoning as clearly as I can.

Why it matters: this is how you get to retire. Without this, you work until you die. If that sounds fun, stop reading and prepare to embrace lifelong serfdom.

In retirement, the idea is that you aren’t working, but life will still cost money. Two ways one can afford that: have a big enough money pile that it lasts you to the end, or get income to replace a paycheck. Imagining any other outcome is fantasy, though it is reasonable to include cost-of-living cuts in that planning as long as you also think about unavoidable cost-of-living increases.

Therefore, in essence, your retirement planning means figuring out how to replace the work income, or how to save enough money to last you. If you do neither, plan to work until you fall apart, then eke out a living in poverty–and even that may be taken away. You can’t know what’ll happen forty years out. By now, you should be alert to the probability that the reality turns out worse than you were promised.

The two methods can work together. Your big money pile can generate income, which you then live on, with the money pile itself as some security against a real disaster.

You cannot trust Social Security (for income to live on) or Medicare (for affordable medical insurance, the number one crumple zone of retirement money disasters) to be there. That’s because my generation let the politicians steal too much, yet mine will demand that you sacrifice so that mine gets what it was promised. (We will then die off, sticking you with the bill, all the while grumbling about you. Aren’t we charming? This is why we, as a class, have no basis to look down upon you; we forfeited that right by talking a great game about your future, then doing absolutely zero to back it up. We didn’t bus the tray of our life.) But in the meantime, you need to look out for yourself, and it is safest to plan for the government to do nothing to help you in your old age. Then if they do, hurrah, but it’s a pleasant surprise.

Some employers will offer a retirement savings plan as a benefit. This is nearly always flawed, but far better than nothing, especially if the company matches some of your contributions. How you do this affects your Federal income taxes, so it’s important to understand the different kinds.

There used to be things called ‘pension plans’ that would give you retirement income someday, as a benefit of a long career with one employer. (Kindly stop laughing. My generation was the one from whom that sky-pie was yanked away.) Our precious corporations declared war on pension plans, and lacking all spine, my generation surrendered. We will be the last ones to get the last few of those, for the most part, and if it makes you feel any better about this, most of us won’t even get any. Our parents did.

Don’t get concerned about the insulting interest rates from bank savings accounts. That just means that bank savings are not the place for your retirement savings, because you retire on the money your money earns (and money in bank savings currently earns nothing of note), not on the money you save. That’s why an early start is most important: your $1 at 22 may become $10 by 62. The piddly savings you can afford in your early working years will be the dollars that work longest and hardest for you. But do bear in mind that things go in cycles, that your parents remember 7% interest rates on savings. They also remember 14% interest to buy a car. That sword always cuts both ways.

There are two basic types of retirement savings, both of which exist in employer-sponsored and private forms. You must understand these to have any potential for retirement savings. For ease of description, we’ll call them Trad(itional) and Roth. They appear both in 401k plans (work-sponsored) and IRA plans (something you usually do on your own without employer involvement). Salient difference: what you put into the Trad is deducted from your taxable income, up to a limit, but someday when you take money out, those distributions (withdrawals by you so you can live) will be taxable. What you put into a Roth is not deducted from your taxable income, but in retirement, withdrawals will be tax-free–or so they promise us now.

The skepticism you sense here is based upon three things: a long history of government ineptitude and evil, the fact that my generation will probably eat all the cookies (then blame you for not baking enough; aren’t we sweet?), and the bird in the hand outlook (once you get the benefit, it is too late to steal it back). I, myself, do not believe the Roth promises. I believe that when the time comes, government will renege on them, and count on a cowardly and supine citizenry to kneel and pay the tax. Because I do not believe the promises, I want my tax benefit now, so that it’ll be too late for government to take it away later. For me, that means that a Trad IRA is most sensible.

I also prefer the basic wager of a Trad IRA: if I retire with high income, yeah, those taxes will be brutal…because I am well off. Boo hoo. Whereas in case I retire with low income, my tax burden will be less than if I’d paid the tax up front, and in the meantime, I got many years’ use of the money to make more money.

How you feel is up to your confidence in the future and your own tax planning. Let’s say you take the Roth promise at face value. If you are low income, a Trad IRA’s tax writeoff would mostly be worthless to you. Only higher income people gain much from tax writeoffs, since tax rates are higher on higher incomes. The ideal Roth saver would be a person of low income who saves diligently all his or her life, gradually building up an impressive money pile from careful scrimping and smart investing. If you think that’s you, then by all means do so. The ideal Trad saver would be a person with higher income who accents that high income by taking the tax benefit now, ideally reinvesting the savings for still more gain, or a person who has zero faith in government promises. If either is you, then the Trad makes sense. (I wouldn’t say we are high income, but we are middle income, and I have zero faith in government promises. Advantage: Trad.)

But remember that you can do both, provided you don’t contribute to both in the same year. So if you decided to put money in a Roth while you were young and po’, and then in a Trad while you finally started to make real money, that’s fine. You just need to make a choice each year which to contribute to, and live with it. Both accounts would continue to exist, and if you handled them well, to make retirement money for you. That would also mean not putting all your eggs in one basket, a philosophy of which I approve with a mighty approving.

Okay. Here is how it works in real life practice, each of the four rough possibilities:

Employer Trad (usually also called a Traditional 401k): you agree to have your employer take money out of your paycheck. The employer may match the amount up to a preset limit. A financial institution holds onto these funds, though you remain their owner. The institution offers you a limited number of ways to invest the funds for gain. A few institutions offer great options. Most offer mediocre to lousy options. (Also, the institution gets a big fee for sitting on your money pile, and if you think you do not ultimately pay it, you are naïve. One way or another, no matter how clever the shell game, you always pay all fees, and the sooner you grasp that, the better.) However, even if the options are not great, they beat all hell out of no retirement account at all. And in a Trad, at least you get the tax bennie up front, in essence paying you a bonus every time you contribute. Always contribute at least up to the employer match, and if you can afford more, pour it on.

Employer Roth (usually also called a Roth 401k): like above, except no tax writeoff; you are planning to get to take money out tax-free when you are old. Other than that, same basic philosophy except that piling extra money in now is not getting you a greater tax benefit. Even so, you might still do it.

When you leave that employment, the vested percentage of your account is still yours. Hopefully you worked there long enough to become 100% vested. The sooner you get it away from your former employer, the sooner it is secure from some mismanagement or stupidity on their part. (That would be illegal, of course, but it happens all the time. If you saved $200K, and lost half of it due to an unscrupulous former employer, will it make you whole if the employer goes to jail? Of course not.) Because there’s a lot of stupidity and mismanagement in our precious corporate world, you want to take possession of your 401k funds at your earliest convenience. This is called a “Rollover.” In effect, it becomes (or goes into) one of the following, depending on what it was before:

Personal Trad (usually called a Traditional IRA): this is when you sign up with a bank or brokerage for your own version of the Employer Trad. You deposit some money, and you can invest it however the bank or brokerage allows. Short version: with a bank, you will make no money, so that’s stupid. A lot of people have these at Schwab, Fidelity, Scottrade, TD, or other discount brokerages.

Personal Roth (usually called just a Roth IRA): when you sign up for your own version of the Employer Roth. Same principles, different investing options. The most salient fact–the tax impact–is the same; the ‘Roth’ descriptor is key here. (Roths came along later than traditional IRAs, so if you speak of an IRA without Roth, people think you mean a traditional IRA.)

So when you leave an employer, and want to take your retirement money with you, you either have a personal account of the right type into which you can merge it (“roll it over” in industry lingo), or you will have to open one. The brokerages will be delighted to help you do that, and they’ll even go get the assets for you. Most brokerages have lower minimums for retirement accounts, because they find that profitable (since people rarely loot their retirement accounts). However, you will very likely first have to sell any mutual funds you hold. That’s fine, as they are probably subpar investments anyway. Traditional mutual funds typically are. Key thing to know: there is no salient difference between a Rollover Trad IRA and any other Trad IRA. They share the same tax issues.

You can convert a Trad IRA to a Roth, if you’re willing to pay all the associated tax on every dollar in the account. I’d have to have a good reason to do that, but everyone’s circumstances are different, so I can’t say no one would ever do that. For example, suppose you already had a personal Roth IRA, and you rolled over a relatively tiny Trad IRA, and this was a year of not very high taxable income. As a Roth believer, you might go ahead and pay the tax to roll the Trad IRA into your Roth, because this is a low income and thus a low tax year, minimizing the bite and simplifying your accounts.

Two paras ago, I mentioned mutual funds. If your mind generated the question “Wait. How is a mutual fund different from an IRA?”, and you then felt that you sounded dumb, relax; the question is natural. An IRA is at heart a form of bank account, like a regular savings account: it’s a money pile. A mutual fund is an investment option (like a stock, bond, CD, what have you) available to an account’s holder. Thus, your whole account is an IRA or 401k, in which you might or might not choose to own one or more mutual funds, depending on what you think is to your advantage. A mutual fund is basically a bunch of stocks and/or bonds bundled up together. Simplified further, it most resembles a single stock–at least, it resembles that more than it resembles a bank account.

Thus: I might say “I hold shares of the Fidelity Magellan Mutual Fund in my Trad IRA account.” However, I would never say: “I hold shares of a Trad IRA in my Fidelity Magellan Mutual Fund account.” Cart before the horse.

So how does one pile up this money? From a strategy standpoint, the goal is to make the biggest possible heap of money in the most tax-advantaged way. As my CPA has drummed into me, there is tax avoidance (which is legal), and tax evasion (which is a felony punishable by imprisonment and fines). Earlier, we went over the decision process between Trad and Roth, which is a very personal one; the math favors one or the other depending on how you forecast your life will unfold. Whatever you pick, if you’re twenty right now, I would guess that you’ll need close to $2 million to retire comfortably, but no one really knows. Safest way is to keep saving until you do know. It’s not possible to retire with too much money.

If your main retirement is with an employer, and you’re under 35, know this: conventional separately managed mutual funds (i.e., run by a trained professional with discretion as to what the fund will buy and sell) usually underperform the market. They get paid handsomely anyway, which I personally think is disgusting. Why pay someone handsomely to do worse than the market? I don’t need to hire ineptitude; I can supply all of that I might want, right, free of charge? (Gods know I often have.) There is usually an index mutual fund among the account’s investment options, which I consider nearly always the most sensible choice, because it outperforms the pros in a majority of cases simply by doing its best to achieve the market return minus very modest fees. It buys and holds the securities that are in the index, period. However, be prepared for some fluctuations in value over a lifetime, as you go through market crash cycles. Those typically occur when a lot of people are doing a stupid thing, which you can expect the public to do as soon as it forgets the lessons from the last fiasco. In my life, they were in 1987, 2000, and 2008; my guess at the next one is circa 2020. Every ten to twelve years isn’t a bad guess. The only certain way to avoid those market crash cycles is to invest so that you never really make any money, so that’s like saying the only way to stay out of the hospital is to commit suicide. True, but no way to plan your life.

If you have a retirement account that only you control–either rolled over from an employer, or started on your own–you have many options, including many that were not available to me in my callow youth. If I had it to do again today, with a full working life ahead of me, I’d put it all in several different index ETFs, and put new money into whichever was lagging the rest (on the logic that the laggard is most ripe to bounce back). It is therefore time to explain about index ETFs.

We covered my complaints about conventional separately managed mutual funds, and my preference for index mutual funds. While the latter are usually more sensible, both suffer from the outdated conventional mutual fund model. ETFs–exchange-traded funds–are technically also mutual funds, but unlike conventional funds, their shares aren’t created and destroyed daily as people buy and sell. A finite consistent number of their shares exist, one may buy those shares on the open market, and one can set a limit price. Index ETF fees tend to be very, very low–as they should be, because any non-moron owning a computer and subscribing to a market news service could manage an index ETF. An index ETF manager has the discretion/choices of a U.S. Marine recruit in boot camp.

What it means is that if a young person started a Trad IRA and put all his or her contributions into an S&P 500 index ETF, or other stock index ETF, and kept doing so all his or her working life, the following would be true:

  • That person would probably retire in comfort.
  • That person would probably not ever need any more advice from me.
  • That person would probably not stress much about it.
  • That person’s trad IRA would probably outperform any employer-ruled 401k s/he might also have.
  • I would be very happy for that person.

Oh, that person would deal with job changes and rollovers, sure; however, the rollovers would probably go to bulk up the existing IRA. The biggest issue would be the need to avoid going over one’s allowable tax-deductible annual contribution, because the limit is not per account–it is per person, per year, and exceeding it sucks. The IRS makes sure it will suck. Take whatever actions you must in order not to exceed it.

If that seems a little unfair, think on this: if your biggest problem is having to ask some questions and do some math to figure out how to put the max into your retirement portfolio every year, you are very fortunate or very thrifty. But if you already have enough basic savings to act as your crisis crumple zone, you could always just open up a taxable brokerage account (householded with your IRA for easy review and management) and invest that money however you see fit.

And some year, maybe the year you are out of work for four months and money got tight, maybe you’ll come up short of the max to put into your retirement. If so, you’ll have money in the brokerage account to move over and make the full contribution. In the meantime, if you have to sell a stock or ETF to raise that cash, you’ll pay tax on part of the gains (the dividend and capital gain part), but it’s rarely a big hit. Nothing like the three-finger shocker you’d get if you’d put it all in a conventional mutual fund that lost 20% that year, and then notified you in December that oh, by the way, here’s the amount of taxable income our realized gains and dividends will cost you. Yes. It really is that bad. Such a fund can lose a bundle, and due to tax laws, have to distribute capital gains and dividends so that the IRS can tax you on them. I trust you can see how miserable that would be. If you are wise, unlike me, you will opt out of receiving and paying that invoice.

Does it sound like this is a lot simpler than people make it out to be? I think it is. You can make it as complicated as you choose, but for most people I think simplicity and a mechanical investment discipline are best. There are no guarantees, just like there are no guarantees one won’t die in a car wreck tomorrow. Just as you maximize your odds of safe travel by driving defensively, you maximize your odds of safe and profitable investing by doing sensible things.

One last word on market trends. On any given day, you can find pundits writing articles ‘calling a top,’ ‘calling a bottom,’ predicting a crash, predicting a huge runup, anticipating a ‘correction’ (that’s marketese for ‘dropping a financial deuce’), and so on. They all have one thing in common: no one ever calls them to account when they are wrong. That’s why Jason Kelly, one of the better financial authors and a very good guide to the nuts and bolts of smart investing, calls them “Z-vals” (zero-validity predictors). They might as well be rolling dice. Since they are never fired or hanged when they are wrong, their opinions mean nothing, and should mean nothing to you. Don’t let them get you worked up or demoralized. They don’t really know; they just get paid to write articles.

And always remember: you retire not on the money you saved, but the money you made.

As for me, I’m your Robin Hood. I hate Wall Street, a snake pit full of entitled criminals that goes about buying and selling elected leaders like some cities used to sell and buy human beings. I hate all the people, and there are many, who have positioned themselves to take away more of your money than they deserve and earn. I don’t make any money from your gains. The only satisfaction I get is the moral joy from helping you game the system to your advantage.

My payoff is to sit here and do the mental math about the revenue denied to a class of criminals because of each person I tipped off.

Good hunting.

Investing, Social comment

Ebowling for dividends and growth

2 Comments

I take a weekly investing e-letter authored by Jason Kelly, a Coloradoan* who lives in Japan. Jason is an interesting guy, a rare combination: an experienced financial advisor with a fine track record and a degree in English. He is author of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing, which remains the clearest introductory book I have seen on the topic. Jason has writing game. Jim Cramer is not fit to do Jason’s laundry, either as writer or financial advisor.

In addition to insightful, readable commentary on the financial markets, the typical Kelly Letter incorporates some social comment at the end. Like me, Jason does not consider himself obligated to join in media-purveyed panic. Also like me, Jason doesn’t mind making fun of the inherently ridiculous. This week’s edition ended with Jason’s commentary on the Ebola situation. I laughed so hard that I requested and received gracious permission to share its full text with my small but smart audience. Thanks, Jason.

===

That’ll do it for this week.

With America’s nationwide Ebola death toll up to one and possibly rising, public health officials warn it’s not too early to take personal precaution. A recent survey by Boston-based Hitseeker Group found that six of nine people who’ve heard Ebola mentioned at least three times since Oct 6 believe they know somebody who comes into frequent physical contact with Ebola-infected blood, urine, saliva, stool, and/or vomit, and are therefore at risk of contracting the deadly virus themselves by handling said fluids among their friends.

Worse, this is under current circumstances. Should the American hot zone spread, the incidence of thinking one knows a person at risk of contracting Ebola is likely to spread, too. Officials point out that should authorities in Dallas fail to contain the disease, it could get as far as Plano and Fort Worth. Pressed for details, they project the maximum possible death toll in the United States to lie between 316.1 and 317.9 million people accounting for those who die prior to contracting Ebola due to heart disease, cancer, or stroke.

A spokesperson for the new Homeland Quarantine Coordination Agency cautioned against distraction from the Ebola threat by reports that, every day, an average of 1,973 Americans suffer a heart attack. “This is old news,” he said. “We must face the new threat head-on while there’s time.” Citing a statistics book, he illustrated how easily the Ebola death toll could double. “With one more death,” he said, holding up a finger and pausing, “just one, we would double the number of people who have died from this terrible disease. Think of what two more would do to the growth rate. Then … three. We could see the number of deaths rise tenfold in no time if we don’t nip this in the bud.”

The agency has devised a color-coded Ebola alert system to help guide behavior. It’s currently flashing bright red, leading some to wonder what color will be used should the rate of expansion increase, but the issue has been tabled for a less pressing moment. The simplest cautionary procedure during a bright-red alert such as the current one is to limit blood, urine, stool, and vomit play to people one knows well and trusts, an admittedly daunting task in a society as friendly as America’s, but well worth it in the short term.

Be careful out there.

Yours very truly,
Jason Kelly

===

*Some say ‘Coloradan,’ others ‘Coloradoan.’ My own Colorado cred comes from Fort Collins, where the city newspaper is called The Coloradoan. My parents were/are CSU Ram alumni, and we lived up on the Poudre. Jason’s a CU Buff, but I also like to see them win, so no divide there. But I will always maintain that the term for a Coloradoan is, well, a Coloradoan, because when I was a Coloradoan, that’s how I learned it was put.