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Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late
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Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late
He who hesitates is lost.
~proverb
Change, especially a collapse scenario, often happens quite fast. So fast that there’s little to no time to react in the short frenzy between “before” and “after”.
This is true throughout nature. Glaciers that took millennia to form calve off into the sea in a matter of moments. Old-growth forests filled with thousand-year-old trees can be decimated by a single wildfire. The bubonic plague “Black Death” pandemic of the Middle Ages killed one-third of the Earth’s human population within just four short years.
Fast change is also a hallmark of human society. Movements and ideas — oftentimes simmering for years, decades or longer — suddenly reach a critical state in which the populace is swept up into history-making action. The outbreak of World War I. The Civil Rights movement. The dissolution of the USSR. The Digital Age.
When it comes, change happens swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.
I’ve witnessed this time and time again since co-founding PeakProsperity.com. And in pretty much every instance, I notice that the vast majority of people — including even many of the the watchful and preparation-minded folks who read this site — are caught by surprise.
Fukushima
A good example of this was the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March of 2011. Of course, no one could have foretold the timing and scale of the tsunami, and virtually nobody expected that it could overwhelm the facility as spectacularly as it did. So in the immediate aftermath of the plant’s failure, the world looked on in sympathy, not fear.
But on March 12th, that changed as the first of several hydrogen explosions was observed among the reactors. And then my phone rang.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way
New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way
Given the brutal start to the markets in the first three weeks of 2016, we thought it a good time to check in with the team at New Harbor Financial. We have had them on our podcast periodically over the past years as the market churned to ever new highs, and have always appreciated their skepticism of these liquidity-driven “”markets”” as well as their unwavering commitment to risk management should the party in stocks end suddenly.
So, how is their risk-managed approach faring now that the S&P 500 has suddenly dropped 8% since Christmas? Quite well. Their general portfolio is flat for the year so far — evidence that caution, prudence and hedging can indeed preserve capital during market downdrafts.
We’ve invited the New Harbor team back on this week to hear their latest assessment on the markets, as well as how they’re approaching their portfolio positioning moving forward:
We spend a lot of time talking about position sizing. Right now we have very little in the stock market. We never cheer for a crash in the sense that we know a lot of people would likely get harmed in such a scenario, but we also spend our time assessing reality and probability. The likelihood of probability for a crash certainly has never been non-zero, but it has developed a greater likelihood than it had even just a few weeks ago. There has been a notable sentiment change.
I’d like to point out: we’re not even a month into the year and we have already clawed back over two years’ worth of gains in the stock market. Even if you look at the S&P 500, which has been the most lofty because of its capitalization-weighted nature, where we are at right now takes us all the way back near the end of 2013.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For Heaven’s Sake: Hedge!
For Heaven’s Sake: Hedge!
Q: How do you make a small fortune on Wall Street?
A: Start with a large fortune.
~ old investing adage
Last fall, I wrote an article titled Defying Gravity that warned of the absurd price levels that stocks and bonds had risen to.
The piece first looked at the unbroken multi-year march upward in prices through the myriad money-printing cycles of the world’s central banks, as well as the near-extinction of bearish investors on Wall Street — which it then contrasted with the vast gap between valuations and the underlying weak economic data, deteriorating chart technicals, and evidence that the “smart money” was exiting the market. The takeaway? Prudence strongly recommended moving to cash and hedging one’s open market positions.
Less than a month later, the stock market abruptly dropped by 7%. Those who didn’t seek safety in advance were left licking their wounds, panicked not knowing if the painful down-draft was over.
Fortunately for them, the Federal Reserve jawboned it’s willingness to step in further if needed, the ECB announced a trillion-Euro stimulus program, the Bank of Japan waded into domestic and foreign markets as a buyer of last resort, and China’s central bank continued its staggering balance sheet expansion. Collectively, this put a floor on the markets, which soon climbed back to record highs.
Where We Are Now
So here we are roughly six months later, and the same warning bells are ringing — just louder this time.
Yes, stocks recovered from their brief October swoon, and yes, they are at — or very close to — their all-time highs. Indeed, everything is so awesome that investor sentiment has never been more positive. If you worry that having too many people on the same side of the boat is a sign of complacency and over-confidence, the following chart should frighten you:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
