Down goes the Dow

He is probably knows more about investing than any of us here but his adherrence to Hussmannn and the "market is going to collapse" philosophy has cost his investors lots and I mean lots. The market over the last 12 years has gone bonkers and it seems his investors have missed out on that.

Igy is retired - I don't think he advises anyone formally anymore.

Okay - thanks Agip.

One guess who clicked the upvote for this post of yours.

Thx.

Been adding to positions in tech ETF and to Nividia holding. Watching for a favorable price to get out of SJNK as you touched upon yesterday. I'm slightly underwater (just barely) on that one and would like to get out at a break even point if possible.

Someone gave me recommendation on Synopsis, (SNPS) and that looks attractive, esp. longer term as it has the same upsides but less of the systemic risk of the chip manufacturers like Nividia. I got a little, but the momentum still seems to be with the NVDA, both on the upside and downside.

Have you seen how decimated small caps have been for the last few days? Maybe just sector rotation back into tech. Really, with hints of rate hikes easing, tech would inordinately benefit and maybe this is just a reversal of their getting beat up do badly during the rate hikes of the last 15 months.

That has nothing to do with my question.

I will gladly answer in more detail later. Out and about next couple of hours.

Traditional value investing goes through periods of underperformance in bull markets, especially during the Tech Bubble, and in this All Everything Bubble. Now some will claim traditional valuation methods are no longer valid, and that technology has made this so. I disagree, the only thing that is different in this cycle is the extremes of monetary and fiscal policy. I would think this would be self evident with inflation, Fed missteps, current banking crisis, and Government fiscal problems. Any short term up moves in the market should be sold. Why? Wall Street has much to gain by projecting the facade that all is well. Even so, I would expect to see EPS forward estimates to come down, and a recession to occur before year end. The focus for investors should be the rate of change in EPS, and not Fed monetary policy. Keep in mind during the Tech Bubble and Great Financial Crisis the market deteriorated throughout the Fed rate cutting process. I would assume some of the largest EPS cuts will come to the cyclically more sensitive Technology Sector. You already see some evidence of this in layoffs at the mega cap tech level, and the carnage in the unprofitable tech. But heck, I have a 75 IQ, so caveat emptor.

small caps have been just wrecked: the vanguard small cap index was down 15% in just 41 days. And yeah that cascaded recently. I'm almost always heavy in small cap so I am totally on the back foot right now. Really doing poorly, with my standbys value and small cap being wrecked. This is one crazy whipsaw market.

My sense is that small caps are usually viewed as being very susceptible to economic slowdowns and first we had sticky inflation that implied an eventual hard landing...then we had a financial crisis that implied recession. A one-two punch that really hurt me,

That said, I'm still up on the year by a percent or so, but that's much less than the +2% of global 60/40 which is my benchmark. But over the past year I'm well ahead of that benchmark so I'm playing with house money to some extent.

I bought some VGT, a tech ETF, to try to stop the bleeding. I've got so much wrong lately that I suspect that will blow up in my face too.

XLK is the tech fund I hold, and it indexing much like your VGT.

A comparison shows no appreciable difference, virtually same fees, dividend, and market cap (approx.), Even the top ten holdings are roughly the same as one might expect, though I do see that the VGT seems to be a weighted index to include the small cap tech companies, which XLK doesn't appear to be.

Performance virtually identical, too, with XLK just a fraction above VGT.

If this bank instability truly materializes, yeah, small caps would be particularly vulnerable, like you said. And at the same time, the cash rich, big tech companies would have little to worry about, relatively. So double wammy.

A lot going on....

I see with a market up day you crawled out of the bunker.

Actually wrong, last week Treasuries fell by $7 Billion, MBS $2 Billion. Here’s the source by the way. Ha, ha:

Earnings Scorecard: For Q1 2023 (with 5 S&P 500 companies reporting actual results), 5 S&P 500 companies has reported a positive EPS surprise and 3 S&P 500 companies have reported a positive revenue surprise.

well that week felt like garbage but the SP500 was up this week.