The key is to sit tight. Ukraine is not the Fed. And it will pass.
Here’s a chart that showed what happened when Russia snatched Crimea in 2014 — basically nothing.
Putin is a small Black Swan. The only other “Black Swan” event are a bunch of “developing” countries that borrowed in dollars. The pandemic has affected their payback ability. That could cause some blips — Turkey is a mess, etc. This won’t affect China and Europe. It won’t be 1987.
The mid-November downdraft started when the Fed and inflation caused “investors” to awake to overpriced tech stocks and take their profits before year end. That’s still happening, though there’s more panic now. Precious tech stocks like Apple, Tesla, Google, Amazon are still on a death roll.
The pandemic/government stimulus stocks continue to end their run. Most indicative: Home Depot. Fed help for new home fixups and new home offices had gone bye-bye. HD and LOW are suffering. Here’s them over the last six months.
Clearly also Zoom, Peloton, Robinhood, Generac and all the other pandemic plays we should have sold months ago and fortunately did.
Wall Street is great at creating stocks that will benefit in Our New World — from oil to palladium, from nickel to gold, from dividend paying stocks to fintechs (to benefit from rising interest rates).
I read Wall Street “logic” — I read a lot. None of it persuades me it’s anything other than desperation.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman, BofA, etc.. gotta to keep pumping out daily recommendations. They need the free ads to generate fees on their creative ways of managing your money. Harry’s advice: Don’t give them any.
What none of them did was to issue a gigantic screaming SELL signal in mid-November 2021. They just did what we all did (me included) assume that the stratospheric prices on tech stocks were going even further past the moon to Mars and beyond.
Since November I’ve been selling stocks that are in a new world (e.g. HD and LOW) or were off at least 15% from their highs. I ended up with cash, sitting inn a lonely bank account earning absolutely nothing. But better than losing it in a downdraft like today and yesterday.
I keep looking and mulling. The BIG discipline is not to let your cash money burn a hole in your pocket and respond to something stupid like “Put Your Money To Work.” I’ve heard that dumb expression from a zillion money managers, brokers, etc.
I have four ideas:
+ Amazon. I could write a book on why I love this company — seller to the world, cloud provider to the universe.
+ Nvidia. Visual chips. For everything from my stock price charts to gaming, to cars that see and drive themselves.
+ Enbridge. 6.5% dividend yield in the energy biz. It’s really run well.
+ Ford. They’re making great cars and trucks. There’s lots of buzz about their new electric offerings — truck, car and van.
I have several NO ideas:
+ Intel. I have watched this company do dumb things for 40 years. Their latest dumbness has gone bonkers. They’re going to spend $20 billion on a factory in Ohio to build chips for others in competition with Taiwan Semi. Oih vey. If Intel stuck to its knitting, maybe Harry Newton (ie. me) could buy a faster laptop to replace his pre-pandemic klunker. This is INTC compared with TSM over the last ten years.
+ Don’t buy other people’s ideas, like the banks, or he fintechs, like PayPal, or Square (now called Block).
+ Don’t try to catch a falling knife, like BABA.
+ In fact, don’t buy other people’s ideas. Every time I buy into someone else’s impeccable logic and over-enthusiastic enthusiasm, I find there’s always a gotcha.
I should write a book about gotchas. There’s no substitute for study and more study and then 20 years of experience. That’s my miserable reason for not writing this blog every day. I can make a fool of myself one or two times a week rather than every day.
My shoulder has improved. I’m playing tennis every day. No serving. No crazy overheads. and no topspin backhands. Backhand slices don’t hurt my shoulder. Forehand ones do.
My super doc, Jerry Clements, says my cholesterol and my weight are too high.
My eating life is about to get even more boring.
So far, this mid-November-to-now downdraft has cost me around 16%. That’s eaten into paper gains, not principal, so far. My biggest dollar gainers have been (in order) Apple, Nvidia, UNH, PANW, Arista Networks (ANET), and Taiwan Semi.
Putin missed his chance to make his people rich. But China didn’t. Good news: It sees that its bread is better buttered with us. I found this somewhere:
Meanwhile, Beijing is set to kick off a series of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of former President Richard Nixon’s trip to China. The seven-day visit in 1972 paved the way for the resumption of diplomatic ties between the two countries and set the stage for China’s opening to the world.
The purpose of the events, Chinese diplomats say, is to encourage scholars, business people and others to speak up for the need for continued engagement between the two world powers.
President Richard Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon toured the Great Wall near Beijing in 1972.
The supply chain must be easing. Ford is advertising a lot. They would not be advertising if they were short of chips for cars and trucks.
See you tomorrow, or so. — Harry Newton
