Monday 4^th January 2021

Enjoyed breakfast with an old school friend, training partner, athlete client and business partner this morning. Ironically we somehow got onto the topic of investing. I’d never have thought, knowing each other since 1990 that we’d be sitting at breakfast 30 years later discussing investing in shares with such enthusiasm. Ain’t life grand!

 

Tuesday 5^th January 2021

xxxx emailed:

'VAE doesn’t seem to be impacted too greatly when Alibaba is their biggest holding (7%) has dropped 25% since Jack Ma’s speech in October. Apparently he’s not been seen in public for two months now…'

I saw profit guidance announcement from NCK starting profits would be up approx. 100%. A mate bought them a while ago, so I shared the announcement. He wasn’t happy… Turns out he’d recently sold them to cut down his number of holdings.

The joys of active buying and selling!

Deciding what and when to buy is one thing. Deciding when to sell is also a challenge, if this is your approach. I know of plenty of people who bought CSL for cheap and sold at $40 to $100 dollars after 5-10 X’ing their money. Imaging they’d not sold…

But they did so who cares what happens after? We do, as human beings unfortunately. The games our minds play never end.

It’s easy to looking backwards in time with all the answers. Making real time decisions based on the unknown future in the now is a completely different story.

On another note… With such focus on the move to digital currency’s with crypto’s/BTC all the rage, the RBA today said the number of bank notes in circulation rose by $1.6 billion in December 2020. The $50 notes the most popular with $1.1 billion alone.

Most of these notes wont circulate, instead they’ll be saved for emergency cash stash.

 

Friday 8^th January 2021

I was unsure about continuing this dairy post 2020. The events of the past 48hours have changed my mind.

With the ruckus at Capital Hill in the USA, BTC going to $30,000USD then 10day later (this morning) hitting $40,000USD, greater Brisbane going into a immediate 3 day lockdown due to one case of an apparently new COVID virus strain and the share markets roaring up locally and in the US, Denmark offering home owners 20year fix rate interest rates at 0%, I need to document how this ends up… What crazy times we’re in!

 

Tuesday 12^th January 2021

www.sharesight.com today emailed my 2020 investing habits. I did 65 transactions in 2020, 90% of which were buys and added four new holdings.

The average number for all Sharesight users was 45 transactions, 71% being buys and adding 12 new holdings.

My buy % was lower than expected at 90% as I off loaded a couple of holdings in early Jan 2020 and one in late 2020.

Also the adding of four new holdings won’t be repeated. I have six holding and one of those four was a short-term speculative play and the others were optimisation to hold and dollar cost into forever. Simple stuff.

Will likely add a couple of holdings in the USA at some stage this year, if opportunity lines up.

 

Saturday 16^th January 2021

First time since 2005 I’ve not attended the annual USANA Kick Off conference in person. Instead, as you can guess it was streamed live online.

The highlights were:

• The release of the new Mood Support products 
• Two educational sessions, one on business skills and the other on personal branding
• The short term incentive available for connecting customers with our products
• One of my business partners knocking it out of the park (so to speak) with her section in the new product launch and training on how to share the products online.

Leadership is not how far we advance ourselves, but how far we help advance others I heard John Maxwell say numerous times. I love seeing my business partners grow in skills and influence to the point they are independent from me and asked to share their skills and experience with others.

It’s a real highlight.

Also here’s a quick interview I did with champion athlete Matt Bevilacqua on dealing with stress. He shares some fantastic suggestions. Watch video. 

 

Tuesday 19^th January 2021

President elect Joe Biden last week announced a $1.9 trillion dollar COVID package. The market didn’t seem to think much of it.

Today is distributions (EFT’s pay ‘distributions’ while companies pay ‘dividends’. Both put money in your pocket) day for my Vanguard holdings. All of which have been reinvested to buy more ‘units’ (as they’re called ETF’s or ‘shares’ as they’re called when talking about companies structure holdings).

Distribution days are better than birthdays. They happen four times a year, you always receive great gifts and you don’t have to organise a thing!

 

Wednesday 20^th January 2021

The ASX today reached an 11-month high while AFI (one of Australian oldest and most trusted listed investment companies) released its interim report today.

Long story short, they maintained their interim dividend (paying it out of savings) while their actual revenues were down 38.9% and profits down 42.4% after tax.

It’s probably a good time to remember the share market (in this case the ASX, but it’s the same for all share markets) is forward looking and it’s clearly looking past this COVID mess the world finds itself in.

Today Trump leaves the Whitehouse the Biden takes over. For how long, no one knows…

 

Thursday 21^st January 2021

Two more LIC’s reported today with a historic catch cry of ‘smoothing dividends’ in challenging times.

MLT cut its interim dividend by 36% to $0.0575. Profits and revenues both down over 40%, the same as AFI.

BKI cut its interim dividend 45% while it’s profits were down 40%.

That’s 3 three LIC’s in two days saying the same thing. Add VAS’s December 2020 distribution being down around 45% from the previous years and we’re getting a clear picture of business in Australia the past 6 months.

BTC is down to around $32,000USD but that could change by the time I hit save on this entry!

 

Sunday 24^th January 2021

‘The biggest generator of long-term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them.

Discipline is more reliable than motivation’ – Farnam Street Newsletter

 

Wednesday 27^th January 2021

You get an infringement notice for speeding in the mail. You’re to pay $572 by February 17^th. Suddenly investing that $572 today, right now irrespective of the market price, if it’s under or overvalued is secondary.

Putting that $572 into the market is without doubt easy to do and an insanely superior option (assuming paying speeding fines was optional) to paying the speeding fine you received.

Contrast this situation with the fact you’ve not received a speeding fine today, so have nothing to pay, other than deciding where and when to invest the spare $572 you have.

This will likely be more difficult now you don’t have a negative option (speeding fine) as a comparison.

This is part of the psychology of investing or more specifically mastering our emotions. Figuring ourselves out is more important than what the market does. Just ask anyone who sold or went to cash in March/April last year.

We have the ability to control our emotions. We have no ability to control the market.

With this known, it cuts out all the noise surrounding investing. 

 

Thursday 28^th January 2021

Former Treasurer and Chairman of the Future Fund, Peter Costello said the ability of policy makers to respond to future shocks in the economy is now limited.

“Investors must also remain conscious of the potential for economic, market and geopolitical shocks, particularly given that the ability for policy makers to respond with further measures is limited.”

What I do know is when (not if) things turn to poo again; you’ve got to be prepared along the lines of ‘in times of peace, prepare for war’, economically speaking.

Thornhill’s rules of spend less than you earn and borrow less than you can afford are fantastic rules of thumb. Along with invest first and spend the rest as opposed to spend first and invest the rest.

Or as a young Jim Rohn said to his mentor ‘If I had more money I’d have a better plan’ to which Mr Shaoff replied ‘if you had a better plan you’d have more money’.

Over night Facebook reported a record December quarter, thanks to its ad revenue, up to $28.07B USD from $21.08B USD the December 2019 quarter.

Finally, the GameStop short squeeze happening is unbelievable. Watching it play out to the letter and aggressively bend over the hedge fund is insanely entertaining!

Right now at group of average people on reddit are sending a Hedge Fund to the wall.

This is an enormous 'power to the people' moment in institutional finance on Wall Street, the biggest market in the world.

The people are doing to this hedge fund what hedge funds have been doing to the people for decades.

This is an enormous paradigm shift in power at minimum, temporarily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ToOGrUQ7ME

For anyone interested, here the fully sequence of updates (until today): https://www.reddit.com/user/DeepF******Value/

 

Friday 29^th January 2021

Well, well, well this escalated quickly. Trading platforms stopped buying of GameStop in the USA and Europe. Holders could only sell for lower prices.

It’s absolutely criminal if accurate. No wonder crypto currencies and DeFi popularity are soaring. 

The second the shoe is on the other foot, the manipulators cry foul and scream for regulation.

Not a single person with money too loose has come out and said ‘we played you got us. Beat us at our own game’. Instead they cry like children for mummy to make everything ok.

Robinhood trading platform has been hit with a class action on this: https://au.pcmag.com/personal-finance-apps/85205/robinhood-faces-class-action-lawsuit-for-blocking-gamestop-stock-buys

 

Sunday 31^st January 2021

Google and Apple have removed 100,000’s of negative reviews on the RobinHood app while this power shift plays out. The GameStop crowd haven’t sold out and remain solid at this point in time.

It’s been a lot of fun watching this situation play out. It’s been suggested by Chamath Palihapitiya ‘wallstreetbets’ is now the largest hedge fund in the world, except it’s completely decentralised and entirely democratic’.

[Footnote – apparent the clearinghouse halted Robinhood’s training of certain shares, not Robinhood themselves]