Principles of Wealth #26*

The financial industry promotes the idea that life insurance is something every sensible person should have. In fact, life insurance makes sense only in certain circumstances. For many people, it is unnecessary. For many more people, it costs more than it should. The prudent wealth builder will be very careful about how much life insurance he or she buys.

Almost nobody understands life insurance fully. Not lawyers. Not accountants.  Not even the financial planners and insurance agents that sell it.

There’s a good reason for that. Most policies – especially permanent life insurance policies – are complicated. They are written and sold using language that is incomprehensible to ordinary people.

To make matters worse, life insurance is sold using rhetoric that pulls on the heartstrings of potential buyers, inducing them to spend more than they might need to.

It would take a book to explain this in detail. But if you are considering the purchase of a new policy or want to understand a policy that you currently own, the following should be helpful.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of life insurance: term life and permanent life.

Term Life Insurance

Term life insurance is relatively simple. When you buy a term policy, you are paying a stated amount of money (the premium) for a stated amount of coverage (the death benefit) given to someone you choose (the beneficiary) if you die within a certain amount of time (the term).

Example: John Doe, a 40-year old executive, buys a million-dollar term life policy. It has a 30-year term. The cost is $100 a month the first year. Each year after that, the cost goes up. If he dies before he’s 70, his wife Helen gets $1 million. And that’s tax-free. (Life insurance benefits go to the beneficiaries tax-free.)

Sounds good to John. What can go wrong?

  • If he fails to keep up with his premium payments during the term, Helen gets nothing.
  • If he lives past 70 without extending the policy, Helen gets nothing.

But there’s another thing: What if Helen doesn’t need $1 million if he dies? What if she’s gainfully employed? What if all John needs is a $100,000 policy to cover his funeral expenses and some other odds and ends?

Wouldn’t he be wiser to get a  $100,000 policy and cut his monthly premiums by 70% or 80%?

Permanent Life Insurance

Permanent life insurance is complicated. First of all, it comes in a variety of forms – whole, universal, and variable being the most common. But let’s not worry about that. Let’s stick with the basics.

When you buy permanent life insurance, you are paying for two things: a life insurance policy plus a tax-deferred savings account.

Because of the investment aspect, permanent life insurance is considerably more expensive than term. How much more expensive depends on how much you want to invest and how much the insurance company is going to charge you in management fees, sales commissions, and administrative charges.

So for a million-dollar permanent life insurance policy, John might pay in $300 a month – of which maybe $100 would go towards the insurance and the rest towards his savings account and various fees and commissions.

Those fees and commissions can be costly. With some policies, they can be 50% to 100% of the initial premiums.

It is for this reason that one should be skeptical about permanent life insurance. The question is always: Would it be smarter to buy term insurance separately and put the rest of the money into a tax-deferred savings account?

There are 4 upsides to permanent life insurance:

  • As the name implies, your coverage lasts forever.
  • The savings portion of it accumulates tax-deferred. Over a 30- or 40-year period, that savings can make a considerable difference.
  • The obligation to pay the premiums can work as a sort of forced savings for people that don’t feel they would have the willpower to regularly contribute to a separate savings account.
  • Because of the savings component, your policy has a cash value that builds tax-free over time. You can borrow against it while you are still living. And the “loan” can be paid off by the policy’s death benefit after you die.

As for the downsides:

  • As with term life, if you fail to keep up with the premium, the policy lapses.
  • Permanent life usually requires a medical exam. If the exam indicates that there is a statistical probability that you might die earlier than would be typical for someone your age, you will likely pay more for the same amount of death benefit.
  • Because of the high costs of fees and commissions, the cash value of most permanent policies is very low for at least the first 10 years. Much of your “savings,” in other words, go to enriching the agent and the insurance company, not you.
  • Over the long term – in 30 or 40 years – the cash value of the policy may not be what you expected it to be. In selling permanent policies, agents are allowed to show you “expected” returns based on “expected” stock and bond market averages. But these are not guaranteed.

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The Stock Market Is Getting Dicey -Here’s What I’m Doing About It

The US stock market gave investors a good scare late last year, with the DOW dropping from a high of 26,562 on September 24 to a low of 22,445 on December 18. The newspapers were full of good reasons. On the top of the list were rising interest rates and the fear of a trade war with China.

But by the end of the year, it had climbed to 23,327, ending the year with a loss of 5.63%.

Thousands of investors abandoned stocks during that last quarter. Dominick and I did not. Our investment philosophy is long-term, big-cap, and value-based, so we look at price drops as buying opportunities. And we took advantage of the drop to buy some additional shares (of PG, IBM, BUD, MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, AAPL, MMM, ORCL) with the cash I’d accumulated from dividends in 2018.

Of course, ending the year with a loss never feels good. And that was especially true for us since my portfolio had made a ton of money in 2017 and good profits consistently since setting it up in 2012 (even in 2015, when the DOW closed down 2.23%).

This year, the DOW is up about 9%, as is the Legacy Portfolio. So you’d think I’d be feeling good about staying in the market. But I don’t feel good. I feel nervous.

There are lots of reasons to be concerned about not just another dip but a crash. And not just an ordinary crash but one that could last for a long time.

One reason: Half of all investment-grade debt is “teetering on the edge of becoming junk,” a colleague pointed out recently. “And more of these risky loans are being owned by mutual funds than ever before.”

Worst of all, he said, “They’re being held mostly by your average mom and pop investor. When these risky companies become unable to pay their debt obligations, it will send shockwaves throughout the debt market, then the stock market. And it will be disastrous for most individual investors.”

And then, of course, there’s that ever-growing elephant in the room: the national debt. In 2,000, it stood at $5.6 trillion. Today, it’s estimated to be $22.7 trillion.

But those aren’t the scariest numbers. The scariest numbers are ratios – the debt as a percentage of our country’s gross domestic product. (Think of it in terms of personal debt compared to personal income.) In 2000, that $5.6 trillion in debt represented 55% of our GDP. Today’s $22.7 trillion represents 108% of our GDP.

And it’s not expected to get better.

Younger investors today tend to be optimistic because they haven’t had the benefit of living through a period of high inflation. And their only experience with a serious recession was in 2009, which has been followed by this long bull market.

Young investors may, therefore, keep investing.

Older investors may take the opposite course. They may get out of the market in part or in whole and wait for good weather.

I’m nervous because I feel like we are in for a drop and possibly a sustained drop. But I’m not going to change my investing strategy because it was designed for the long-term and because I can wait it out.

I can wait it out because (1) I never fully retired (i.e., gave up my active income), (2) I have multiple passive streams of income from different asset classes, and (3) my stock portfolio represents only about 20% of my net worth. So if the DOW drops by, say, 50% for 10 years, I’ll be okay.

I’m not saying this to boast, but to explain that the only way you can possibly avoid being devastated by a stock market crash and a long recovery is to take a comprehensive approach to wealth building – one that includes multiple streams of income, stores of wealth in at least a half-dozen asset classes, and “plan B” strategies for limiting losses.

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Principles of Wealth #25*

“Hard money” advocates and precious metals dealers contend that gold is not only the safest way to store wealth but also a very good way to grow wealth. The truth is, gold is a valid way to protect wealth from certain unlikely economic situations – but for the ordinary wealth builder, owning lots of gold is both risky and unwise.

There is a school of economic theory that puts gold above all other asset classes.

Here’s the argument:

* Stocks can go up but they can also go down. The same can be said for real estate, commodities, and bonds. But over the long haul, gold will preserve an investor’s wealth because of its intrinsic value.

* President Nixon made a huge mistake in 1971 when he took the dollar off the gold standard. When the dollar was tied to US gold reserves, the government could not print more dollars than there was gold to back them up. Now, the government had the freedom to print as many dollars as it wanted, backing them up with Treasury bonds (promises to repay the debt sometime in the future).

* When nothing can stop the printing of dollars, politicians will print them in an effort to speed up economic growth. But as the number of US dollars in circulation increases, the value of the individual dollar goes down. This causes inflation spikes that make virtually every asset other than gold – stocks, real estate, commodities, and bonds – worth less.

* In 1970, before Nixon’s decree, an ounce of gold could be bought for about $35. In 2019, that same ounce of gold would cost about $1,290. Meanwhile, as US debt has skyrocketed, the risk of a massive economic collapse has become more and more likely. Any day now, we could see banks freezing assets, the stock market crashing, bondholders losing everything, and “blood in the streets.” Gold will then be the only currency that anyone will accept. And here’s the silver (gold) lining: When that happens, the value of an ounce of gold will soar to $5,000 and even $10,000. Investors that own gold will become the new rich.

So… is that likely? That’s the million-dollar question.   READ MORE

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What You Can Learn About Investing From a Las Vegas Casino

The last time I was in Las Vegas for more than a business meeting was when my children, now grown and with children of their own, were in high school. We spent a week there, marveling at the mega-hotels, getting lost in the cavernous casinos, riding the rollicking rides, shopping in the scenic super-malls – generally swept away by the sounds and scintillations of that surreal, synthetic city.

Las Vegas offers a special kind of fun. It won’t give you the expansive fun of trekking the desert or the aesthetic enjoyment of walking through Rome. It’s more like a B movie or a Keno girl cinched up in lace and silk stockings: a type of sensory indulgence that you can’t be proud of but you don’t feel ashamed of either.

I remember the reaction of Son Number Two, who was reading Will & Ariel Durant’s history of ancient Rome at the time. Shaking his head, he kept saying, “This is surely the end of the American Empire.”

One can’t deny that thought. In terms of size, sumptuousness, and spectacle, there is no other place in the world like Las Vegas. (I’ve not been to Dubai.) The vast, opulent malls America pioneered in the early 1990s prepare you for the size of it – and Disney World/Land can give you an idea of how friendly replica environments can be. But they are but cartoons to the masterpiece of marketing and merchandising that is Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a one-and-only and offers a sui generis experience to all who visit.

A World Unto Itself

Take the Bellagio…

The casino is larger than several football fields and jam-packed with roulette tables, poker bars, and one-eyed bandits. It has its own mall… a deluxe promenade that rivals Worth Avenue or Rodeo Drive, featuring the same deluxe stores (Gucci, Armani, etc.) you can now find in every major tourist city around the world.

Walking into the lobby you can’t help but be awed by Dale Chihuly’s Fiori di Como, a glass sculpture composed of 2,200 hand-blown glass flowers and covering 2,000 square feet of the ceiling.

In addition to dozens of casino-side eateries and buffets, the Bellagio offers at least a dozen first-class restaurants, bars, and nightclubs within its buildings, as well as several theaters.

Outside, a water show takes place every 30 minutes. It is a wonder of science – computer engineering and plumbing – that provides a spectacular, three-dimensional representation of show tunes and opera that ranges from charming to breathtaking.

And there is the Bellagio Fine Art Museum, which displays, I was surprised to discover, large (if not great) works by Picasso and other 20thcentury masters.

The first half of the Bellagio cost something like $1.6 billion in the mid-1990s. The second half, built later, cost more.

Defining Our Terms

Three billion dollars is a lot to risk on a new business. But was this a gamble?

Were the people that invested in the Bellagio back then gambling? Were they, like the people sitting at the casino’s blackjack tables and slot machines, risking their money against the odds?

Or would you call it an investment?   READ MORE

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Principles of Wealth #24*

The banking industry promotes the idea that money stored in cash instruments (such as saving accounts, CDs, and money market funds) is safe money and a riskless financial strategy. But it is not true. Cash, like every other asset class, has risk.

On Saturday, Ted reads an article in The New York Times predicting that the president’s new tariff plan will decimate international commerce. Sunday morning, he reads a WSJ article pointing out that the stock market is dangerously overvalued with an average P/E ratio for the DOW of 25. At noon, he reads an essay by an economist he admires that points out that US debt is now higher than it has ever been.

He goes to bed feeling uneasy.

Monday morning, he calls Joe, his stockbroker. “What’s going on with the market?” he asks.

“You’ve seen the numbers?” Joe replies.

“What numbers?”

“It’s down.”

“How much down?”

“About 10%.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not good.”

“And my account ?”

He hears the tapping of fingers on a keyboard. “You should be relatively okay,” Joe says. “Your portfolio is very conservative.”

A bit more tapping. Then, “You are down just a bit more. Around 11.5%.”

“Shit,” Ted says. “I knew this was going to happen. What do you think I should do.”

“That depends on how you feel about the future. Our analysts believe this is a dip in a long-term bull market.”

“I don’t believe that,” Ted says. “Sell.”

“Sell everything?” Joe asks.

“Everything.”

“And do what with it?”

“Just leave it in cash.”

The tapping again.

“Okay,” Joe says. “You are out. Your money is sitting in cash.”

“Good,” Ted says “I feel better.”

“Then you made the right decision,” Joe says. “What could be safer than cash?”
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Principles of Wealth #23*

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Delray Beach, FL.- Wall Street promotes the idea that investing in stocks and bonds is the sensible way to grow rich. But a strategy that focuses solely or even primarily on stocks and bonds is a flawed strategy. The prudent wealth builder knows this.

Pat told me about the great delivery service he’s been getting from Company A. “The other guys,” he said, “they just drop the packages over the fence. But Company A’s guy drives in and delivers my packages to the door.”

“I really like this company,” Pat said. “So I did some research. And based on what I learned, I think it’s a good investment. I’m going to buy their stock.”

It sounds smart. It reminds me of how, in One Up on Wall Street, Peter Lynch described his amazing success as the manager of Magellan Fund, which made 29.2% from 1977 to 1990, bringing the assets under management from $18 million to $14 billion.

“Invest in what you know,” was Lynch’s most popular investment rule. He attributed his success to his habit of going beyond the spreadsheets and looking under the hoods of the businesses he bought. He argued that the average investor could do the same.

He was wrong about that. And there’s a good chance that Pat will be wrong about the trade he’s about to make.

Why do I say that?

Because the average investor can’t possibly know enough about the stocks he buys to achieve a 29.2% return over a long stretch of time. The average investor, in fact, can’t even achieve the average overall market ROI of 9% to 10% over time. The average investor makes a third of that, if he’s lucky.

When Lynch talked about investing in companies you know, he meant that you should know more than you can ascertain from the public filings, from the balance sheet, the P&Ls, metrics such as P/E ratios, etc. He liked to get inside the industry a bit, get to know the players, ask questions of the execs and the frontline workers.

Lynch had the power to do that. The average investor doesn’t. At best he can do the kind of research that Pat did on Company A. But that’s not nearly enough. He’s still very much on the outside.

I’ve been “inside” the investment advisory business for more than 30 years. I have known dozens and dozens of managers and analysts. I know many of the best-known gurus. Most of them are smart. Most of them are driven. Some of them beat the market for a while. But few can match Lynch’s record. (And Lynch’s performance, let’s not forget, ended after 13 years.) So how can the average investor expect to do what even the pros can’t?

No matter what you hear from Wall Street, the stock and bond markets are not there to help the average investor get rich. They are there to provide fees and commissions to brokers, managers, and analysts.

Buying stocks and bonds is a sensible thing to do if you see it as a part, and only a part, of an overall investment strategy. What the smart investor should expect from his stocks and bonds is what the market is willing to give average investors. And that is average returns – 9% to 10%. Not 29.2%.

Now I agree with Lynch and I’ve said it a thousand times:  The smart way to build wealth is to invest in what you know. But when I say know, I mean know inside and out. I mean know with your eyes closed. I mean know the beating heart of it.

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Principles of Wealth #22*

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The efficient market hypothesis is bogus. The stock market, its sectors, and its individual stocks are often mispriced. But that doesn’t mean speculating on those errors makes sense.

Speculation is at best an intellectual form of gambling, like playing blackjack rather than roulette or craps. But all forms of speculation are likely to decrease one’s wealth over time. And every experienced speculator, in his heart, knows this to be true.

Selling speculations is not speculating. It is a form of business. And for some, it is a very profitable business.

 The prudent wealth builder that speculates treats his speculations as spending.

Delray Beach, FL.- In an essay published in Investopedia, Tim Parker writes: “Whether speculation has a place in the portfolios of investors is the subject of much debate. Proponents of the efficient market hypothesis believe the market is always fairly priced, making speculation an unreliable and unwise road to profits. Speculators believe that the market overreacts to a host of variables. These variables present an opportunity for capital growth.”

The argument Parker attributes to speculators is correct. The stock market is often inappropriately priced. And sectors within the stock market are badly priced even more often. Not infrequently, market sectors are grossly mispriced. The same is true for individual stocks.

I am always astounded when I think of how quickly and widely accepted the thesis of the efficient marketplace came to be. The logic, simply put, is that the big financial players – including institutional investors, hedge funds, and the like – have, through internet communications and computer technology, access to all of the key financial data they need to value stocks. They even have access to indices of public sentiment. With all that knowledge available and updated in nanoseconds, the price of any stock, any sector, and even the market itself will of necessity reflect the correct pricing.

This doesn’t make sense on several levels. For one thing, it is impossible to measure consumer sentiment or to predict its ebb and flow. More importantly, raw data (such as history of earnings, revenue growth, P/E ratios, etc.) cannot possibly give a reliable view as to the value of a company in the future.

I cannot tell you with any accuracy the true value of the equity of any of the companies I own and control. And I certainly could not predict what the value will be in six months or a year. So how could these data-crunching investment behemoths know?

But forget about the logic. Take a look at any 20-year period of stock market valuations and you will find moments when the market “corrected” itself, sometimes with a fall of 10% or more. What is happening there? There can be only one answer: irrational exuberance. And as I have already pointed out: You cannot measure accurately, let alone predict, the fluctuations of investor sentiment.

But that doesn’t mean that speculating is a reasonable way to accumulate wealth.

(Note: Hedging and arbitrage are not necessarily speculating. If done properly, they are the opposite. We will talk about them another time. This is about speculating and only that.)

What is speculating? John Maynard Keynes said it is acting as if one “knows the future of the market better than the market itself.” I like that definition because it emphasizes the core problem with speculating. It is fundamentally a bet on the future. And betting on the future is betting on something that is largely unknowable. Why bet on future possibilities when you can make good money investing in the known facts, the realities, of the present?

Professional speculators use sophisticated strategies such as swing trading, pairs trading, and hedging along with fundamental analysis of companies/industries and macro analysis of economics/politics to place their bets.

Just think about what I just said. The best speculators are crunching numbers from all these realms and using complex, technical strategies to make their decisions. And it is all done in the hope of getting way-above-average ROIs. It’s a whole lot of work. And at the end of the day, success depends on thousands of uncontrollable and even unknowable details. Where is the reasonableness in that?

John Bogle, bestselling author and founder of the Vanguard Fund, wrote a book called The Clash of Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation. In it, he demonstrated that individual investors almost always lose big when they speculate. He says that speculating is an “unwise” strategy for ordinary people whose goal is to safely accumulate funds for retirement.

“The internet and financial media may encourage speculation,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean you should follow the herd.”

Indeed. The reason the financial media and the brokerage community promote speculation is because they benefit from the fact that most speculators lose and lose big. And all those losses end up in the pockets of the brokers and the bankers and also the prudent investors that would rather invest their money safely for reasonable gains than gamble for big wins.

* In this series of essays, I’m trying to make a book about wealth building that is based on the discoveries and observations I’ve made over the years: What wealth is, what it’s not, how it can be acquired, and how it is usually lost.

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A “Simple Question” With a “That Depends” Answer

Monday, November 5, 2018

Delray Beach, Florida.- “I have a simple question,” RS wrote. “How can you calculate the odds for losing your money before you start a business or invest your capital? I’ve read what you said about it, but I can’t figure out how to do it! (I can, though, tell you that the odds to roll a 6:6 with two dice is 2.77%.)”

I like the critique implicit in RS’s question. The answer is that you cannot mathematically calculate the odds of losing money in a business. But you can figure out if the odds are in your favor.

I told him to start with this:

* Have you ever started the same or a very similar business before?

* If not, have you worked as a senior person in the same or a very similar business?

If the answer is no to either question, the odds are against you.

If I feel the odds are against me, the only way I will invest in a new business is if I can do a series of marketing tests to identify its optimal selling proposition within a timeframe and a budget that I can afford.

That will be different for everyone. For me, the timeframe would normally be up to but not more than 2 years. And the dollar limit would be $50,000 to $100,000.

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Principles of Wealth: #21*

When the odds of a particular speculation are extremely long, we refer to it as gambling. And gambling, most sensible people would acknowledge, is a foolish financial activity. Unless, of course, the odds are in your favor.

It must have been 40 years ago. I was a young man, returning from my first trip to Las Vegas. The man next to me was an architect. His specialty was high-end hotel-casinos. His favorite part of the job, he told me, was designing the VIP suites. They were immense pleasure domes, featuring every imaginable luxury, including gilded furnishings and indoor pools.

“How much would one of those go for?” I naively asked.

“Oh, they never charge for those rooms. They give them away to high rollers for free.”

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Notes From My Journal

Does the SEC Really Give a Crap About Small Investors?

Delray Beach, FL– “The private markets are awash in capital these days,” Jay Clayton, Chairman of the SEC, told entrepreneurs and business-school students in Nashville recently. “The question is, who is participating?”

For decades, regulators have walled off most private deals from smaller investors. Because of the added risk of private investing, they must meet stringent income and net-worth requirements to participate. As a result, small investors never had access to companies like Uber Technologies and Airbnb.

Mr. Clayton wants to change that.

“This is good news,” TM said in a memo to my partners. “And it would be no small potatoes as it would open a big line of biz. Early Seeds.”

TM was talking about the opportunity for businesses like ours, publishers of investment advice, to sell more newsletters and other advisory services focusing on this newly opened and quite exciting topic.

Here’s what I think: Yes, it will be good for financial publishers like us. And it will be great for financial advisors and brokers and all the guys with suits that live off Wall Street. But it will not be good for ordinary investors, particularly the elderly and vulnerable. This change will make the sum of them poorer. And I’m pretty sure Mr. Clayton knows that.

 

From My “Work-in-Progress” Basket

A Serious Answer to a Dumb Question

 “What habit made the biggest difference in your life with the least effort?”

This is the sort of question you see on Quora – ultimately dumb but superficially interesting. I rarely open the links because I know the answers will likely be as silly as the questions.

That’s what happened when I saw this one.

But then I thought: If I am taking questions from an audience and someone asks this one, how would I answer it? I couldn’t dismiss it as a stupid. What would I say?

Hmmm… the audience is waiting. Clock is ticking…

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