The Better Letter: Math-Challenged - Bob Seawright

Humans are lousy at math and probability.

Math-Challenged

Math anxiety is real, and it is not altogether misplaced. For example, 40 percent of 12th-grade students tested below even basic mathematics achievement levels in the most recent national survey from the Educational Testing Service. Generally speaking, most of us are “math-challenged” in some significant way. 

We are all prone to innumeracy, which is “the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy,” according to Douglas Hofstadter. It describes “a person’s inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives.” Math is hard and often counterintuitive.

For example, most people would consider it an unlikely coincidence if any two people would share the same birthday in a room with 23 people in it. People would generally look at it like this: since one would need 366 people (in a non-leap year) in a room to be certain of finding two people with the same birthday, it seems to make sense that there is only a 6.28 percent chance of that happening with only 23 people in a room (23 divided by 366). However, 99 percent probability is actually reached with just 57 people in a room and 50 percent probability exists with only 23 people (see more on the “birthday problem” here).

Interest rates 101: How they influence the market? - financialflagship

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/DJI/BlLg2BvD-Interest-rates-101-How-they-influence-the-market/?&utm_source=Weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TradingView+Weekly+99+%28EN%29

As individuals, we face decisions every day that implicate saving money for future use or borrowing money for consumption. If we want to make an investment, one important task for us is the analysis of transactions with present and future cash flows. When we place value on any asset, we are trying to determine the worth of a stream of future cash flows.

Money has time value which means that individuals prefer a given sum of money the earlier it is received.

Consider the following exchange: You pay $4,000 today and in return receive $3,500 today. Would you accept this arrangement? Not likely. But what if you received the $3,500 today and paid the $4,000 one year from now? Can these sums be considered comparable? Possibly, because the payment of $4,000 a year from now would probably be worth less to you than a payment of $4,000 today. It would be fair, therefore, to discount the $4,000 collected in one year; that means to cut its value based on the time that passes before the money is paid.

How People Lose All Of Their Money - Wolf Report

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4415658-how-to-avoid-losing-all-your-money

Summary

• One of the most common misconceptions is that once you have money or certain capital, it's difficult to lose it. This is deeply flawed - it's entirely possible.
• Going from million/millions to zero is certainly possible, and there are just as many ways to do so as to go from zero to a million.
• I spend a lot of time researching and looking at both sides of the coin - and in this article, I'm talking about how to avoid losing all your money.

Photo by fizkes/iStock via Getty Images

Peter Bernstein: The Importance of Staying Power

The behavioral side of investing gets a lot of attention while the personal finance side often gets less than it deserves. That’s because how defensive you are with your finances helps determine how aggressive you can be with your portfolio. Put simply, it’s easier to roll with the market’s punches when everything outside your portfolio is in financially sound shape.

Peter Bernstein dwells on the impact of being wrong on investments because the consequences can go beyond losses. The nature of investing guarantees everyone will be wrong sometimes. That means unexpected gains in some cases (being wrong isn’t all bad) and losses in others.

How quickly you can recover from losses will have a big impact on your long-term wealth. There’s an obvious psychological hurdle to recovering from losses but the state of your finances impacts your ability to recover too. Bernstein calls it “staying power.”

In planning portfolio strategies, I have always been obsessed — perhaps too much so in some instances — with a rather negative but overwhelmingly important question: What are the consequences if I am wrong? I should stress that this question need by no means lead to an excessively conservative investment philosophy, for it has led me on a number of occasions to take much bigger risks for a client than a more conventional approach would have suggested as appropriate. But I do believe that no investment decision can be rationally arrived at unless they are a logical part of a strategy based upon the answer to this question.

This question really relates to the whole problem of risk, which is an inescapable component of the investment process. We simply do not know what the future holds. This means that we are perforce going to be wrong a certain amount of the time — but we also never know which decisions it is that will be the incorrect one (we are often right, in fact, for reasons that we never anticipated: is this actually being right or being wrong?). Hence, we must move ahead always on the assumption that the next decision may be the wrong one and with the realization that we must face the consequences if it is.

The consequences of being wrong essentially involve an examination of the opportunities to recoup any losses that may be incurred. And these opportunities will be determined by two different sets of conditions.

The first and most important condition is staying power. An investor who has a substantial income or a significant amount of cash reserves that can sustain him regardless of what happens to his cash reserves can let time work in his favor in recouping losses; the greatest disasters are really limited only to those investors who are forced to liquidate at moments dictated by external events — a loan to be repaid, a job lost, a tax bill not reserved for — rather than at moments dictated by investment considerations only…

The second condition for recouping losses is the nature of the investor’s decision-making ability. Given a reasonable period of time, because markets do fluctuate, it takes an extraordinary series of poor judgments to do a really bad job of investing. You may fail to make a killing or even to run with the fastest crowd, but it is really difficult to lose money at investing if you have the staying power to carry you over the bleak periods.

I make this rather bald statement on the basis of an important fact of arithmetic: you can lose no more than 100% of the money you invest in any one security, but you can make an infinite amount on it. This apparently obvious and superficial statement tells us something that is overwhelming significant for investors: a few good guesses can far outweigh many poor ones…

Thus, the consequences of the inevitable wrong decisions can be kept to a minimum if the investor has the staying power to remain in the game until the next throw of the dice and to avoid involuntary liquidation at the wrong moment. But the consequences can also one minimized if the investor has the time and opportunity to make a few lucky decisions that can readily offset the less fortunate ones.

The greater the staying power, the greater the risks the investors can take to try to find that magic killing.

Every market downturn has its share of casualties due to the combination of investing losses and selling. The voluntary response of panic selling gets warned about incessantly. And rightly so, because it creates the problem of having to buy back into the market. Which often leads to missing out on gains when the market recovers. But the possibility still exists that the mistake of selling can be corrected sooner rather than later.

Forced selling is equally important, if not more so because it can strike at any time if your finances are in poor shape. When you’re draining your portfolio to cover basic needs, it becomes impossible to recover from losses.

A sound base — suitable emergency savings, insurance, debt, and spending habits — provides the best defense against that possibility. In turn, you can be more aggressive in your portfolio.

And, who knows, maybe knowing you’ve got the financial security to withstand drawdowns, may offer the psychological trigger to avoid voluntary panic selling, as well.

Source: Economist on Wall Street

Personal Finance Advice That Changed My Life - Vitaliy Katsenelson

https://contrarianedge.com/personal-finance-advice-that-changed-my-life/

Today I am going to write about a topic I have never written about before: personal finance. I am writing about this not so much for you, faithful reader, as for my kids. My four- and twelve-year-old girls are probably too young for this discussion, but my eighteen-year-old son, Jonah, is right on the cusp of needing to learn about it.

When I got married in 2000, one of the best gifts given to my bride Rachel and me was lunch with my friend Mark Bauer. Mark and I became friends when we studied at the University of Colorado – he was always my dependable study partner. He is ten years older than me, which at the time meant he had double my maturity (I was twenty-eight).

A few months before our wedding Mark, asked if he could have lunch with Rachel and me. At lunch, Mark explained that many marriages come to ruin over money issues.

Mark told us,

"A tool that has been very helpful for me is a family budget. On the surface it sounds easy – you project your “revenue” (for your family that would be your and Rachel’s salaries) and then subtract your expenses, and that gives you your net income. If you have money left over then you have savings, and then you can afford to spend money on whatever your hearts desire."

At that point, I was a bit disappointed in Mark’s wisdom. I was a few months away from completing the CFA designation, and that was on top of my master's degree in finance. The simplicity of his advice was frankly a little insulting to me.

Mark read my unimpressed facial expressions but continued:

"The problem with a normal budget is that though it captures well ongoing daily expenses like a mortgage, the cable bill, groceries, etc., it ignores future expenses. Let’s take your car for example. It’s paid for, which is great. But in five years this car will need to be replaced and “suddenly” you’ll discover that you have a one-time $20,000 expense, which should not be sudden and is actually anything but onetime unless you are planning to drive this car for the rest of your life. But the car is just the beginning – you’ll take vacations, buy furniture, your kids will go to college, and then there’s retirement."

Now this discussion was starting to get more interesting.

The Three Best Things to Have before Starting to Invest - Dick Davis

Excerpt from "The Dick Davis Dividend: Straight Talk on Making Money from 40 Years on Wall Street"

If each of us left our money invested for one hundred years, we get the full benefit of the market’s long-term upward bias. But we invest for only a fraction of that time and the market's upward bias is beset with numerous interruptions. So it helps to have some other things going for us. The three at the top of my list would be luck, longevity, and deep pockets, all of which have little to do with the stock market per se. While luck, longevity, and deep pockets are not absolute requisites for successful investing, there’s no denying that having any one of these attributes gives the investor a distinct advantage.

=============================================

Luck

=============================================

Obviously, it helps to be lucky in every field of endeavor. What’s not appreciated is just how large a role [that] luck, both good and bad, plays in the stock market. Investors are advised to do their homework, to diversify, to allocate, to be patient, to be disciplined—but the best thing is to be lucky. You can be successful without luck, but there are times when you can do all the right things and it won’t matter much unless you’re also lucky.

For example, Mr. Jones’s retirement date was January 1, 2000, so he sold his long-held growth stocks a few weeks before that. Ms. Smith’s retirement date was October 1, 2002, so she sold her stocks a few weeks before that. Mr. Jones’s target date coincided with the peak of the bull market, Ms. Smith’s with the bottom of a steep bear market. There was a sharp difference in payout for only one reason—luck, pure luck. Where the market happens to be when, for example, your kids reach college age and you have to sell at least some stock, is strictly a matter of chance. Much of the gain that has accumulated slowly over the years can dissipate if you are unlucky and forced to sell when the market is depressed.

How To Compound Wealth - Bogumil Baranowski

 https://seekingalpha.com/article/4209572-how-to-compound-wealth

Summary

• Learn to be patient.
• Start immediately.
• Earn, save, invest.
• The first $100,000 is the hardest.
• Never lose money.

If we can only shift our mindset from getting rich overnight to compounding wealth over a lifetime, everything changes and our odds of success dramatically rise…

Learn to be patient

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few nights among the California redwoods - those giant trees from the sequoia family. More than a decade ago, on my first big trip when I moved to the States, I visited Sequoia National Forest. The recent visit was a great opportunity to reacquaint myself with these magical, magnificent trees that dwarf regular pines. As you can imagine, it takes ages to grow this tall; the lifespan of these conifers is counted in the thousands of years. John Steinbeck called them “ambassadors from another time,” and wrote that “the feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.” I couldn’t agree more.

After I returned to New York, I decided to get some seeds of those magnificent trees and watch them grow in a small pot. Though I planted them promptly, the seedlings have yet to appear. Nevertheless, I await them patiently. They remind me of how, as a child, I used to plant pines, birches, oaks, and maple trees with my parents. There is no better way to learn patience than by planting a tree, and there may be no better tree to teach you patience than one of the oldest, longest-living tree species in the world.

Whether you are starting out with $1 or taking on the challenge of managing newly acquired or inherited wealth, there is nothing more important in compounding wealth than patience.

Wolf Report: Make Goals - And Celebrate Investment Achievements

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4413082-make-goals-and-celebrate-investment-achievements

Summary

• The life of an investor is not an easy one. You need to keep up to date on news, happenings, your portfolio, strategy, income, and future. It is, however, rewarding.
• I believe it's crucial for anyone working in a difficult career or field to stay motivated. Create goals - short-term, medium-term, and long-term.
• Reaching goals should be celebrated, and it's something I need to improve at as well. Success should not be glossed over. Celebrate your victories - don't just move on.
• This article is about the importance of grounding and remembering where you come from, as well as where you're going.

Investing For FIRE? Dividend Growth Is The Way To Go - Cashflow Capitalist

 https://seekingalpha.com/article/4412804-investing-for-financial-independence-dividend-growth

Summary

• There are two primary styles of investing that attract Millennials to the stock market.
• One of these investing styles is FIRE, an acronym that stands for "Financial Independence, Retire Early."
• I present the case to my fellow Millennials that dividend growth investing is the best way to invest for FIRE.

Attention, Fellow Millennials!

There are two primary investing styles that attract my fellow Millennials into the stock market: (1) narrative-based momentum investing, and (2) the FIRE movement.

Narrative-based investing is partially what has driven the surging stock prices of popular, cutting-edge tech names like Apple (AAPL), Tesla (TSLA), Amazon (AMZN), Google/Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR), Snapchat (SNAP), Bitcoin, and ARK Innovation (ARKK). It's the narrative that fuels these soaring stocks.

Millennials like to invest in the brands they know and admire. It just seems to make sense that if you use the products all the time, then the stock must be a good investment. And what kind of product doesn't Apple make nowadays? Apple iPhone. Apple Watch. Apple Pencil. Apple TV. Apple Refrigerator. (Okay, that last one doesn't exist, but the fact that you just Google searched it should tell you something.)

The motivation behind narrative-based investing is twofold: first, to own a piece of cool companies/brands; and two, to get rich relatively quick. Because for as long as many Millennials have paid attention to the stock market, these tech names have only seemed to go up. Hashtag FOMO.

Investing, Like Gardening, Requires Patience - CharReg

https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/21491521-charreg/5297877-investing-like-gardening-requires-patience

It’s interesting to me that when Chowder’s blogs go off-topic, it’s often about gardening. Perhaps it’s because similar skills and approaches are needed to optimize the likelihood of success. Both investing and gardening require planning, sowing, nurturing, maintaining, and finally, harvesting.

Planning: With any endeavor, the best chance for success requires a plan. The investor decides on an overall approach such as dividend income or total capital gains, sector allocation, and stock characteristics necessary for selection. The gardener similarly chooses methodologies such as organic practices and gardening procedures such as soil amendments and irrigation.

Sowing: Once an overall plan is in place, investors pick and invest in stocks much like gardeners pick and plant seeds or starts.

Introduction to the BMW Method Screen - Mike Klein

Original post by Mike Klein
https://invest.kleinnet.com/bmw1/intro.html

Screen Page Layout

There are 4 parts to a single stock's BMW Method Screen page:

• Numeric screen results
• Logarithmic price chart
• Linear price chart
• Price distribution chart (statistical info)

Each will be discussed with examples below.

Wolf Report: $1M Portfolio Value - Goal Reached, Moving Forward

Original by Wolf Report at Seeking Alpha

 https://seekingalpha.com/article/4407082-1m-portfolio-value-goal-reached

Summary

• I did not expect my portfolio value to climb as it has during the first two months of this year.
• The combination of excellent performance, nearly 9.3% portfolio growth in 2 months, and continued injections of capital pushed my aggregate portfolio value to $1,002,398,30 as of February 15th.
• While this may a point to shrug at for many readers/investors here with far higher portfolio sizes, it's a "check" for me, who started at zero age 25.
• I go through the changes which can now happen in my investing style.