Taming the Bear: The Bright Side of Bear Markets
I urge you to embrace bear markets as opportunities, as recurring market phenomena that can't be effectively avoided. This is the bright side of bear markets:
I urge you to embrace bear markets as opportunities, as recurring market phenomena that can't be effectively avoided. This is the bright side of bear markets:
Historical Perspective on the Bear Markets of 2022
About a year ago I wrote an article in this space entitled "Retirement Risks Are Mounting". This conclusion was based on the triple threat to retirees - and those close to retirement - of low bond yields, lofty stock market valuations, and rising inflation.
In the last two installments of the Five Seasons Financial Planning blog, Articles on Wealth Management Topics, we spent a fair amount of time discussing inflation and the risk it poses to retirees' finances. If anything, inflation has become even more of a concern since then.
Retirees in particular tend to be exposed to purchasing power risk, the risk that their sources of income don't keep pace with the inflation of their living expenses.
Several recent surveys indicate that inflation has now overtaken the pandemic as the primary concern among investors and retirees. Allianz's 2020 Retirement Risk Readiness Study concluded that 57% of Americans are worried that inflation will make basic retirement expenses unaffordable. If in fact inflation does re-emerge after decades of benign behavior, it will be particularly damaging for those close to, or in, retirement.
It's sometimes said that sound portfolio management is simple, but not easy. In other words, the concepts behind successful portfolio management are reasonably easy to grasp in theory, but are counterintuitive and emotionally difficult to implement consistently in practice.
There's no doubt that lower fund management expenses and lower transaction fees are beneficial to investors - all other things being equal. But that's the rub. There are several other cost considerations in choosing which ETF to buy, and when to buy it, that can easily outweigh whether you pay or receive 50 cents per $1,000 invested per year, or whether you pay your broker nothing or $7 per trade.
“You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don’t realize it at the time.” This statement must seem like a paradox when your portfolio balance is declining at an alarming rate on a weekly basis. But "money is indeed made" in a variety of ways during financial market upheavals like this one. And doing so doesn't require any particular market-timing skills or short-selling prowess, but it does require a disciplined and consistent approach to portfolio management, a focus on the longer term, and a certain amount of courage and conviction.
At the risk of overdoing it with client communications, I'm feeling that developments in the financial markets in the past week warrant another outreach to all of you, and in particular to those of you who weren't Five Seasons clients during the October 2007 - March 2009 bear market. In the interest of brevity, this missive will take the form of a list of talking points that have occurred to me, or that have cropped up in one-on-one correspondence with clients, this week. Here's hoping the following will calm nerves, provide perspective, satisfy curiosity, or simply help you to pass time while "social distancing":