Retire

There are only two ways to invest (part 3)

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carolina-pimenta-J8oncaYH6ag-unsplashSo there are two basic strategies to invest, and your first decision as an investor is to decide which road to take. In part 2 we talked about the active option, in part 3 we’ll cover the alternative option: passive investing.

Whereas active investing feels right, passive investing is a little counter-intuitive. You actually don’t have to do anything to be a successful passive investor. You should probably have an understanding of how the market works and have a conviction about why you’re investing the way you are, but as far as activity goes you’re taking it real easy.

One of my favorite analogies for passive investing is salmon fishing. Salmon fishing is not sport fishing, it’s almost like harvesting, like work. The importance is not in casting and reeling (a staple of sport fishing), the importance is in how well you’re set up. You need to have varying types of bait at varying depth of water, you might try variations in boat speed, variations in direction, variations in water depth, etc. The important thing is to be equipped to catch a fish at any moment by diversifying your offering as much as possible. Once you’re all rigged up, you sit back and let the market do its work.

The basic question here is about whether or not you’re confident in the fact that the market is efficient. If you believe the market is efficient (which data supports) any attempt to outperform the market by actively picking stocks or timing the market is vain. Instead of spending time on all different types of analysis and market trends, the focus can be on how to design the most efficient portfolio possible, how to diversify in the best possible way. Instead of trying to bet and predict the market, you simply need to own the market as efficiently as possible. It’s an entirely different game.

Passive investing is a wonderful thing, it reduces a great deal of stress. A poor year of returns is simply a result of the market, it’s not the result of some poor guesses by you or anyone else. A recession is no longer terrifying because you’re well-diversified and you understand that the market always bounces back, that the average market downturn lasts less than a year. Your retirement is no longer a question of ‘if,’ but of ‘when.’ A passive investor is free from analyzing endless piles of company data, the uneasiness about the market sectors they’re invested in. Passive investors don’t have to worry about how the riots in Hong Kong, or Bolivia, or Lebanon, or Iraq will affect their portfolio. It’s an entirely different way of being.

So the first decision you’ve got to make as an investor is whether you’ll be active or passive. That’s certainly not the last question you’ll have to answer, but it’s a very important one and one that set the direction of your investing journey and your financial future.

Financial Advisors aren’t evil (mostly)​

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I met a stranger this morning (the beauty of Facebook marketplace). He had looked me up in advance, not to be creepy (he assured me), just to make sure he wasn’t meeting a crazy person. He saw that I’m a financial advisor and wondered if I had ever met his financial advisor, whom he trusts very much. In fact, he trusts his financial advisor so much he recently handed over full discretion, meaning the advisor no longer needs his permission to make trades and move money. It was becoming cumbersome to give the okay every time the advisor wanted to make a trade. I informed him that I had not met his financial advisor, and he assured me that his advisor is a great guy.
Here’s the thing, I’m sure he is a great guy, I’m sure his intentions are (mostly) pure. Many financial advisors are really great, and they really care. But that little discretionary bit he shared with me is alarming. When it becomes cumbersome to approve every trade your advisor wants to make, that’s a problem. According to the data, financial advisors who actively trade routinely underperform the market, even advisors who are really great guys. Don’t work with an advisor only because he or she is a great person. Find an advisor who is a great person, but who also understands how the market works, how to most efficiently capture returns, how to avoid stock picking and market time and trying to beat the market, and most importantly, how to coach you. Your future depends on more than the integrity of your advisor. He may not be evil, but he may also be submarining your retirement.

5 ways your investing app is ruining your retirement

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In the last five years, we’ve seen the explosion of alternative investment avenues, especially through apps. While technological advances (computers, algorithms, the internet, you get it) certainly make investing a better and easier experience than it’s ever been, they’ve also promoted some troubling trends in popular consumer investing apps.

Here are a few ways your investing app is ruining your retirement:

  1. Investing apps are built for active trading which loses money compared to the market. In order for investing apps to be interesting, they promote active trading. No one wants or needs an app to help them buy and hold and never make trades. Unfortunately, active trading is a recipe for disaster. Even professionals lose to the market when they actively trade stocks, not because of any inherent flaws in themselves, but because it’s literally impossible to consistently beat the market.
  2. No great offerings. Because they’re designed to encourage active investing, investing apps don’t offer many great investing options. Even if you could ignore all the crap, the best funds aren’t in there. Sure, you can find some cheap ETF and index funds, which aren’t the worst options in the world, but they’re definitely not the best. And investing apps know you might try them out, but ultimately you’re going to be moving money around.
  3. Your earliest years are the most important years and you’re wasting them. Investing apps appeal unilaterally to younger people. The great thing about investing when you’re young is that money invested early will compound far more significantly over time than money invested later. Unfortunately, many young people fall prey to these investment apps which do the opposite of maximizing investment dollars.
  4. Mis-education, worthless news. In order to make active investing seem legitimate, investing apps often share news and information regarding the market. Unfortunately, the news is not helpful for investing. Instead of learning about how the market works and how to prudently invest money over time, these excerpts simply validate terrible investing strategies.
  5. Encourage bad behavior. This is the biggest problem. Instead of educating investors, investing apps take advantage of them. Active investing feels right, it seems legitimate, and investing apps only encourage that feeling. Unfortunately, the feelings of investors have no correlation with successful investing, if anything they’re negatively correlated.

So dump the investment app. Learn about important investing concepts like Efficient Market Hypothesis, Modern Portfolio Theory, the Three-Factor Model. Get a good advisor who will get you into the best funds and help you remain disciplined through scary markets. Take your purpose seriously, it’s probably something worth more than speculating and gambling with your investments.

How does your retirement plan look?

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Many of us, especially those who are younger, probably haven’t thought much about our retirement plans. I wouldn’t have put any thought into it either if I wasn’t an investment advisor. But I’ve run into some troubling stats about the relationship between Americans and retirement, so I think it’s worth talking about.

First, by retirement, I mostly mean age, like somewhere in your 60s. I don’t mean quitting all obligations and sitting around by a lake somewhere. Retirement definitely could include that (I’m counting on it!), but most of us probably won’t be content to only sit around. We’ll probably be doing some kind of work when we’re retired. What you definitely don’t want when you’re in your 60s is to be working full time out of necessity at a job you’d rather not be working at (which is unfortunately normal among retirement age Americans). I think about retirement as a time when people have options. I’ll personally want to keep working or doing something productive, but it could be work that doesn’t pay, or pays very little; I’ll be doing it because I want to, not because I have to. And let’s be honest, at some point we just won’t have the strength to keep working full time, so we need a plan to pay the bills.

Here’s a problem, 1 in 3 Americans has nothing saved for retirement. 4 out of 5 Americans have less than one year’s worth of income saved in retirement accounts. That obviously isn’t great. Consumer debt is on the rise. Student loans put young people in a large hole right out of college, the most fruitful investing years. Credit card debt is up. Car loans are accepted as the normal way to buy a car. The average American starts behind finically and borrows their way further down. Partly because of this debt crisis and partly because of our consumer culture, Americans only save about 3% of their income today, barely enough to keep up with inflation let alone fund their futures.

Compounding all of this is our increasing dependence on savings for retirement. Generation Y (Millennials) and Generation Z will to need to lean on investment accounts more than any generation before for a few reasons:

1) Pensions are all but gone. They’re a conduit for too much risk to employers who have shifted to 401(k) offerings. This trend isn’t actually bad, the market will do a better job growing money, and many employees offer generous 401k matching programs. But in order for it to work employees need to be intentional about utilizing 401(k)s, and to understand how the money is invested within the 401(k)s. That’s where we tend to fall short. Employees miss out on $1,336 in employer matches each year. We also let the money we do have in 401(k)s languish in actively trading mutual funds, surrendering large sums to fees and sub-market performance.

2) We don’t know exactly what Social Security will look like in the future, on its current trajectory it will have to be cut by about 23% by 2033. There will likely still be some sort of social security benefits down the road but it’s not something reliable enough to stake retirement on.

So right now, regardless of your age, do you have any idea what your retirement is going to look like? One meeting with an advisor to take a quick look at your situation could save you worlds of financial hurt down the road. Maybe you’re actually in great shape, or maybe there are just a few small things you can change which would have a dramatic impact on your financial future, or maybe you need someone to tell you your lifestyle needs trimming. It’s something you can, and probably should know.

Be Wary of Investing Apps

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Investing today is easier than it’s ever been. One hundred years ago investing options were limited, there were no mutual funds, no ETFs, it was basically banks and single stocks. And even those few options were expensive and difficult to obtain. For most people, investing wasn’t a viable option. Today we’re drowning in all the investment options. It’s become so easy, so normal, you can download an app and own thousands of equities within minutes. The ease is good, and it’s good that more people are able to own equities (equities are the best passive wealth building tool in history) but there are also good and bad ways to own equities, and the ease seems to more often promote the bad ways.

Active investing is essentially gambling, even for professionals. We know the stock market moves relative to news and emotion, neither of which is consistently predictable. We also know that the current price of a stock is the best indication of its current value, stocks aren’t ever ‘on sale’ or ‘overpriced.’ So when an active investor buys or sells a stock share it’s just a bet, a bet that a specific company will either increase in value (in which case you’d buy) or decrease in value (in which case you’d sell). Successfully buying and selling stocks is tough, and no one can consistently do it well enough to beat the market over time, not even professionals. Research shows that the outcome of this active investing style is overwhelmingly negative. That’s part of the reason why we’ve seen a seismic shift toward more passive investment strategies over the last 20 years.

However, we’ve also seen the growth of in-app investing. I’m all for cool apps, and investing apps are among the coolest, but there’s an inherent problem in using an app as an envoy for your retirement. The fact that they are so easy to use is a temptation to actively use them. The fact that they look so nice gives the illusion that we’re doing something responsible with our money. Some offer worthless, even contradictory, commentary on market predictions. Some even promote super risky options (puts and calls) accompanied by incomplete (at best) information concerning the risk involved, and even how they work. Essentially, these apps promote a sort of sophisticated gambling, which is really fun, and really bad for your return probabilities. Apps that have claimed to stand for passive investing seem to be slowly moving toward an active style as well or at least offering it.

It’s probably best to treat investing apps like gambling apps since that’s effectively what they are. Don’t be duped by the bells and whistles, they offer an adrenaline rush and a lot of downsides. Most of us wouldn’t take our retirement fund over to the roulette table and put it all on red (talk about a rush!), so don’t dump your life savings into an app.