Last quarter a client of mine asked my permission to refer his friend to me. He didn’t want to offend me by giving out my business card without my okay.
I’m hereby giving everyone permission to offend me!
What this conversation led me to understand is that I haven’t done a very good job communicating that Generosity Wealth Management has the knowledge, infrastructure, and expertise to help out your friends, family, and those you care about.
I work with clients seeking to grow, preserve, and distribute their wealth in an efficient manner to ensure the well being of themselves, their family, and their community interests.
I’m here to help and treat every client and prospect as a member of my family.
In case you need a reminder about Generosity, here’s a video I did back in May.
The big question we need to answer is “what happens after a Greek default?”.
Lehman’s collapse was a full year before the financial crisis of 2008, and it’s very probable the full impact of Europe imploding won’t be felt for some time.
We, as investors, need to stay informed and ready to react.
Please continue to read my newsletters and blogs, and have my number in your speed dial. 303.747.6455
I’ve had a relatively low position in stocks for clients for quite some time, but I’ve decided to lower it even further. I’m quite concerned about the correlation between Europe and the US, emotion/news driven volatility, and the uncertainty about what the Fed will do.
The risk just doesn’t warrant having as high a percentage as I’ve had.
On the flip side, profitability, efficiency, and cash balances have all been rising in the firms that comprise the S&P 500.
Is the return worth the risk?
Click on video to hear more.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi there, Mike Brady with Generosity Wealth Management, here in Boulder, Colorado and the question is “where do we go from here?” And we’re getting a lot of conflicting information. In the last month or so we’ve had huge volatility. We’re basically in a trading range, we have been for the last three or four weeks, but it’s been a trading range that’s extremely volatile. And we’re talking a half percent to one percent up over a few days and then “Boom!” a negative two, three, four percent.
We’ve seen the correlations between the European markets and the U.S. and Asia; very high. And as we look back, five, ten, twenty years, the correlations for the international market have become increasingly correlated. We’re a global market now. And so what happens in Europe is, irritatingly, affecting our situation here today.
We’re also seeing a lot of emotions. And we’re seeing a lot of news driven markets- which just absolutely irritate the heck out of me. We as a market, as investors, keep waiting for some bail out, some news from the government: and that just absolutely distorting things.
Philosophically, I’m going to go off on a kind of a slight tangent here. I understand that the government will always be a part of our free market system. It’s never been 100% free. However, the interaction we’re having now, it’s like this 900 pound gorilla in the room; that makes things kind of difficult.
Kind of on the flip side, as we’re looking at some of the positive things. We’ve got almost all of the S&P 500 have done their earnings for their second quarter. And year over year growth is about 12% over the previous year. And if we take out some of the financials, we’re talking almost 20% earnings, net earnings growth.
You’ve got net margins, back in 2008, that’s efficiency of almost 6%. Now we’re going all the way up to 9.27. So when you look at companies, at balance sheets, Apple’s got 76 billion dollars in cash. I mean a lot of these companies have cash on the side-lines, they have been very efficient. Unfortunately, the negative effect of that is they have trimmed their work forces. But as you’re looking at some of the larger companies, the S&P 500, they’ve become very efficient over the last three or four years. They’ve kind of trimmed, as they see it, the fat, and they’re sitting on huge sums of investable assets that they can redeploy at some point. They’re just not redeploying it right now. And so that’s very frustrating.
I am, long term, when I say long term, we’re talking three to five years, bullish on the market. I think that, you know, we’re set up for that. But on the flip side, I mean, I hear all the arguments about how Europe is imploding- which it is. How that’s going to drag our financial system down. What’s going to happen with the EU and the Euro is anybody’s guess. And so, there’s a lot of reasons right now where it could go either way. I mean I just want to sit here and admit that.
What I’m doing, in my portfolio, is I am decreasing some of the equity positions that I have. I’m absolutely going to continue to have some. But from the very conservative to the very aggressive models that I have for clients, I am decreasing the equity positions. Most recently, most likely in the next week or two, we’re going to hear what, if anything Bernanke and the Fed is going to do. We’ve been talking about a little bit about this twist where they buy a bunch of medium to long duration treasuries- to shore up…, well to keep interest rates low.
So, you know, there’s a lot of things in play but I’m just telling you that right now I’m going to decrease my equity position. The market could go up. Once again, I’m going to be happy three to five years from now. But right now, it’s kind of hard to analyze which way it’s going to go. And in that particular case, are you getting the return for the risk that you’re taking and right now I’m questioning that. So I’m going to reduce some of my equity positions and decrease the percentage, of course still stay in the game.
Anyway, Mike Brady, Generosity Wealth Management, here in Boulder, Colorado, my phone number is 303.747.6455.
I have a new blog on my web site, www.generositywealth.com. And I highly encourage you to go there and look at it. I’m going to have archives going back a number of years. And I think it hopefully will be, I think it will be very helpful and very interesting as you go back maybe two years of weekly or every other week, videos like this or other things that I’ve found interesting and (some) analysis. So you can go and get a flavor of what I’ve been talking about for the last couple of years.
I am taking new clients I would love it if you gave me a call or passed this video along to someone who might be interested in a comprehensive wealth management firm, Generosity Wealth Management, that’s me. You have a wonderful week, we’ll talk to you later, bye, bye.
Statistically speaking, when 2 or more things move together (both zig at the same time instead of some of them zagging) it’s called a correlation of 1.0. Over the past 30 years the correlation of the global markets have continued to increase towards 1.
This means that it’s a high probability that as Europe falls, it will impact our US markets. How much is the question, but our fates seem to be intertwined.
* Humility — the market doesn’t care what you think
* Knowledge — If you do action A, is B the outcome?
I hope you click on my video and watch–I try to make it the best 3 to 5 minutes of your week. Okay, maybe that’s stretching it, but worthwhile nonetheless.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi there, Mike Brady with Generosity Wealth Management, and this week I’m going to talk about two or three different things, one is conviction, the second is humility and another is just knowing what… oh, the answers to everything, which I guess kind of gets down to humility as well.
I last did a video about a week and a half ago and at that time I said “Gosh, I hope you’re not hearing from me every day”, that means things have calmed down just a little bit. And what has happened in the last week and a half is we’ve had, mainly, some one percent days plus or minus. Which in an environment where it is three to five percent in a day, that actually seems quite calm. But we’d have one percent, one percent, one percent, and then a big three percent drop. What’s very interesting is that although that three percent drop might just give away what you’ve gained over the last three days it seems so dramatic, so huge, when in fact if had been less one percent, less one percent, a slow dribble, it’s not quite as shocking to the system.
And this kind of gets down to a little bit of humility and kind of knowing everything. The market is a very complicated organism, OK? And the only people who understand exactly what is going to happen, there are some people like that, they’re called analysts and journalists, OK? And it is my belief that, many different factors go into what happens on a given day, a given week, a given month, into the particular market.
Let me just step back for a minute and talk about my philosophy in general; about the chaos theory. Things are very complicated- and sometimes things just happen. If A happens B does not necessarily happen. And sometimes B happens and there are a number of things that lined up for B to happen. The market is no different.
In an economy, or a country, let’s just say, in order for it to go from a developing country to a developed country, there are a lot of things that have to happen; you have to have an educated work force, you’ve got to have good governance, and confidence in the judicial system, you’ve got to have an economic system that is free and fair… There’s a number of different things that have to happen in order for a country to really move forward. And if one or two of them are happening, but not all the others, then you’re really not hitting all the cylinders. And so, it kind of gets to my belief in investing that you’ve got to have a conviction.
What do you believe in? Do you believe that the United States is what your bet is long term; whether it’s one year, five years, ten, thirty years. If not, you know, then I might question whether all of my discussions about the stock market are really for you. And if that’s the case we can talk about it, and give me a call; because there might be other non-equity, non-U.S. things that you should gravitate towards. What do you believe in? If you believe in nothing you’re going to be pulled one way or the other and all of these journalists who give you exact answers, which is what we wish that we would have about why a certain event happens. You’re going to be persuaded by one over the other, left and right, etc.
That boils down to my last topic- which is really humility. We have to understand that sometimes things just happen and what we believe is going to happen doesn’t always turn out the way we want it.
You know, I still have a conviction that this a market that I want to participate in but I’m still diversified. I still have some hedging positions. And the last three or four weeks, I have to absolutely admit it is much more drastic that what I had, you know, forecast four weeks ago. But that being said, the conviction is the same but I also have to remember that the market doesn’t really care what Mike Brady thinks; doesn’t care what Generosity Wealth Management thinks; doesn’t really care what you think. So therefore, we have to continue to change our beliefs. And so I have made some changes in the last three or four weeks. I’ve shared them with you over the video as things have progressed. But we also have to have conviction, but we also have to have some humility and also understand that sometimes things, and particularly on some of these days just knee-jerk happens. And so we have to kind of help smooth those things out, try to keep them out of our mind and not let them completely throw us off base.
I’m recording this on a Friday morning, Bernanke just spoke a little while ago and the market knee-jerked down then knee-jerked back up. And so, you know, those things are going to happen, it’s just part of it and we have to stay true to what we believe.
Going forward, I mentioned this at a previous video, that I’m going to have dynamic asset allocation as one of my offerings for my clients and my management system because I do believe that there’s a way that we can keep to our conviction, stay invested most of the time and strategically choose one sector over another. And it’s something that I’m very excited about. It’s something I’ve been working on for a very long time and I’m just about to kind of, offer it to all of my clients.
Anyway, Mike Brady, Generosity Wealth Management, 303.747.6455.
Eeeh, I’m supposed to smile! My mom tells me that I don’t smile enough in these videos but you know, I take this stuff very seriously, and so maybe that seriousness comes out in my lack of smiling here. But anyway, I hope you have a wonderful weekend and we’ll talk to you later bye bye.
