Good times don’t last forever
“I don’t know why and I don’t know when but eventually investors are going to become uncomfortable once again.”
– A Wealth of Common Sense blogger Ben Carlson, commenting on current market euphoria in a 1/24/21 post, “9 Uncomfortable Facts About the U.S. Stock Market.” Read more at bit.ly/3pki1JP.
Every market has its challenges
“If you cannot make it through a bear market without losing your wits, you will never have decent returns. But if you can’t survive a bull market without jumping off every time we hit a new high, you will have horrible returns!”
– The Irrelevant Investor blogger Michael Batnick, in a 1/5/21 post in which he put perma-bear Jeremy Grantham’s latest bubble call under the microscope. Read more at bit.ly/39ZA9Cw.
The short-term sells
“When is the last time you heard a pundit say, ‘Over the next 10-30 years, I expect this to be a good trade’? Never... Because the media only talks about the short-term, it encourages us to assign a seemingly logical reason why the market is acting irrationally in the short-term. This causes us to feel like we’re acting logically by extension when we make a reactive trade to calm our emotions. But the truth is, rational long-term decisions cannot be made based on short-term irrational market movements.”
– Ashby Daniels, author of the Retirement Field Guide blog, writing on 1/12/21. Read more at bit.ly/3izDmfS.
A silver lining
“Before Covid, you couldn’t really ask clients to stay at home for a year to see how much less they might spend. Yet by the time you’re in your 80s, that is pretty much what you’re doing — there’s no commute, not many holidays abroad and your day-to-day living expenses vastly decrease.”
– Michael Martin, an advisor at Seven Investment Management, quoted in a 1/14/21 Financial Times article. He said the pandemic has given people a real-world sense as to what their spending needs might be in the later stages of retirement. Read more at on.ft.com/3qQMxeJ.
Access denied
“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes? The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
– Stefan Thomas, explaining in a 1/12/21 New York Times article why he has soured on Bitcoin. He’s one of many Bitcoin holders who have lost their passwords, without which they can’t access their holdings. Thomas owns over 7,000 Bitcoin that were valued at some $220 million at the time he was interviewed. Read more at nyti.ms/3cacGRN.
