E morte, ad vitam

Dear reader, it has been a while. I named this thing “Fits and Starts” knowing myself all too well, but I had no intention of taking such a long multi-month break. The explanation is a long story involving me doing a little moonlighting and having to watch what I say publicly. But that’s not for today. My apologies; and I do hope you missed me.

Ironic that in my last post before the break I said, “In times of uncertainty, the best choice can be to do nothing at all.” (I didn’t mean it so literally, and in fact had no idea it would be the last post before a sabbatical.) 

On that day, the sky was falling. The Nasdaq was down 5%, Japan had exploded, and CNBC was using its crisis graphics package.

The Nasdaq is up 18.5% since.

In fact, I am struck my how many things have happened during my silence and how little it has mattered for long-term focused investors. The election. Further chaos abroad. New inflation talk. A sedated holiday outlook. On a day-to-day basis, a lot of reasons to go hide your cash under a mattress. And yet, the market is up double-digits in just the last few months. Given the anxiety and headlines that surround an election this was probably the perfect time for a buy and hold investor to just walk away and do nothing. I’d love to say that was my brilliant plan all along. But I’ll settle for being lucky.

It has been a pretty remarkable market. The subscription-only deep value portfolio I put together over at Savvy Trader that has only been going since May has four +40 positions already. That’s weird. These are situations that are distressed enough that it could take years to resolve.

So what now? Even more panicky headlines heading into the new administration. Likely some more wobbles from big tech as the AI revolution continues to show great promise but inevitably will be unable to grow at ludicrous speed indefinitely. Who knows, we might even have a recession in 2025. Or new all-time highs. Or both. My guess it both.

My one prediction: Those who buy low-cost index-tracking investments in 2025 will be glad they did so in 2030.

I’m planning (considering?) a pretty big overhaul of my personal portfolio and will be hashing that out in real time best I can here. And I have lots of thoughts on Elon’s Department of Government Efficiency and what it means for defense stocks. Spoiler: I’m drooling. We’ll get to that soon.

But mostly, I’m just going to try to resume the cadence from before the hiatus. Knowing full-well actually writing is likely to reduce my subscriber count significantly. It’s a good thing I have priced this thing accordingly.