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Stock Ideas Investors Daily Edge Safety First – What 25 Years in the Markets Have Taught Me
Stock Ideas Investors Daily Edge Safety First – What 25 Years in the Markets Have Taught Me 
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By Charles Delvalle I got a recent e-mail from D.R. in Phoenix, who had this to say: If stock trading is such a great way to make money why are there so many companies selling tools to analyze and trade the market? And why are there so many companies selling advice? |
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| Safety First – What 25 Years in the Markets Have Taught Me |
| Wednesday, 08 October 2008 | ||||||||
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When things get really bad in the market, I like to look back at the almost 19 years I have spent carving a living out of it. It helps me ignore the panic. There was a time when people talked about something other than the stock market. The market was considered taboo for most. Too risky. Too foreign. The generation of the Great Depression put their money in the bank. Some still kept it in cans buried under the front porch. In the early eighties something totally new appeared on the investing horizon: the IRA. Life has never been the same. It seems impossible that they have been around for less than 25 years. But, there was a time when people didn’t invest in mutual funds, stocks or options. IRA’s changed all that. For the first time in the history of the markets the average guy had enough long-term money to venture into stocks, the sacred land of the gurus. There was an explosion of investors who poured their money into areas they knew almost nothing about. The result was stock market averages sky rocketing to levels unimaginable to even the most optimistic. 2,000 on the Dow – earth shattering. 3,000 – in the stratosphere. 14,000 plus? You would have been laughed off Wall Street for even suggesting it. I clearly remember the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke 5,000. We cheered. And we worried about what was coming next. This couldn’t possibly continue! These 25 years of the investment explosion have had good and bad results. The people on Wall Street, and those who work for Wall Street firms, have made more money than even they could have imagined. The average guy is another story. Sure, it looks great as the averages fly and the talking heads marvel at the huge gains, but for a hundred reasons, the average guy has come up with a big zero.
As the markets tumble from the latest debacle (this is the sixth I have witnessed) an aging U.S. population is crying for relief. We are looking for something safer than stocks, but certainly offering more reward than the 3% you might get from a bank. For most, the losses are getting to be too much to put up with the stock market lottery anymore. Consider bonds… long ignored as too boring, not enough action or for older folks only. Perhaps these things are true. But there is a whole lot more security in bonds, with almost none of the downside of the stock market and most of the return. As the cry has gone out for safer investments, more and more investors are pulling back from the fast track and finally making consistent returns in the safety of bonds. The secret to making money in investments is not to give any back. That’s what bonds do; you keep a whole lot more of your gains than you do in stocks. And it adds up. The biggest problem with bonds isn’t their security. Investment grade bonds default around one half of one per cent of the time, or a default rate of .5 out of 100. That’s very secure. The biggest problem is that most people know less about bonds than they do about stocks. There is less information readily available. It’s a different language, and bonds have been out of favor with investors for a long time. But, as the population ages and has less time for their stock portfolios to recover from the latest Wall Street disaster, bonds will regain prominence as the investment of choice. The baby boomers will make it so. We have been getting away with our love affair with stocks because we have had enough time to recover from the downside of the market cycles. But, as the boomers reach retirement, and the “almost boomers” (like myself) approach retirement, we have to seek investments that aren’t coughing us up every 18 months. We will not have the time recover our losses in our investments before we have to start living on them. Bonds are really very easy to understand but you need to stick with a few hard and fast rules. - Quality, quality, quality - Do not be a rate pig - Do not buy a bond you can’t hold until maturity - Ladder your portfolio - Stay diversified Since the early 90’s, I have been preaching the gospel of bonds. But no one wanted to listen. The allure of the stock market lottery was too great. Times have changed. Over the next few weeks I will be helping you develop your bond IQ. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but not difficult. While this series is not intended to make you a bond expert, it will give you a foundation on which to build a reliable, predictable and safe investment portfolio. Once you give your money away, it’s gone forever. Let see if we can stop some of the losses. [Ed. Note: Want to make stock market returns… without taking on stock market risk? Want to derive capital gains and income from your investments? Want to keep your wealth safe and secure in these turbulent times? Steve McDonald can show you how, with a carefully selected portfolio of investment grade corporate bonds. Learn more about the Bond Trader here.] P.S. To let me know what you thought of today's article, send an e-mail to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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