daily commentary here in relation to a long term investment strategy is totally meaningless.
I only invest directly in Aussie shares where I am familiar with all that I need to be from an investment perspective. I cannot remember the day, month or even the year I acquired my greatest investments (over 10 bags up to 150 bags). What I remember is after i bought each of them, the price continued to fall, sometimes for years.
At that moment in time, from the outside, I would have looked like a fool. At some points in every investor's journey this happens.
Needless to say, 3, 5 or 10 years later, one could now be viewed as an overnight success. Investing simply doesn't work that way.
I don't get all my picks right, and i most certainly get get the timing more wrong than right. Nevertheless, like many investors, I have averaged 12%p.a. - 14% p.a. mistakes and all. I am happy with that.
Over the last 20 years, Platinum then later Magellan funds have likewise created for me a small fortune in the overseas space where know I know nothing, and do not have the time to evaluate the particular reporting and industry regulations applicable to each overseas jurisdiction. I will leave it to those that are paid to do that.
ETFs are momentum driven not intelligence driven. This more than any other, is the reason I do not feel comfortable following the dumb money. As quickly as it comes it goes driving indices with it. I can absolutely bank on it.
When market cycles turn, I want the comfort of cash, shorts, defensives and risk management. I understand that no rational investor feels comfortable investing in the current market where the risk free rate is Nil. It leads to relative mispricing in every other asset class. So Covid was not the detox, it was the stimulant to drive this anomaly to unforseeable levels of madness, and the humans got it wrong. Index funds, ETF's bla, bla, bla.
I do not deny or resent that during and post covid, machines have done better than (the best) human investment minds. i can also live with it.
However, that does not mean that experience no longer counts for anything. I believe it is priceless. When markets turn down, and they will, people panic, and they do, and return of capital is more important than return on capital, and it is, I want to be owning the mispriced assets that an index will be forced to sell. The next downturn is likely to be longer and deeper than most are prepared for, so opportunities will come over and over again to those holding cash and deploying it when no one else has any. Over 40 years of investing tells me that is the way to make real money.
Well known words from the Oracle: Rule number 1 is dont lose money, Rule number 2 - you know how it goes. Index funds/ETFs can't do it - ever, they follow the flows, not the brains.
I hope both PTM and Magellan remain true to their reading of markets and withstand the current outcries from the peanut gallery. If they do they will succeed and for the umpteenth time prove that every boom likes like it will go on forever until that one day when it stops.
That's when the fun begins.
There are plenty of discounted opportunities all over the world today. They are just not so popular as the overpriced businesses that currently seem to attract "the greater fool". History can be a bitch when it teaches you something you thought you already knew. I have been belted many times since the 1980s and expect to be again, The only difference it that each time I am better prepared.
That is life.
GLTASH
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