Market Changes – More than Financial Advice

March 16, 2020

We know these times create anxiety so we plan to keep frequent communications coming to you as we see events worth reporting on.

This past weekend, The Fed Reserve made another massive rate cut and committed to buy at least $700 billion in government and mortgage related bonds and the Federal Government continues to float ideas of social and economic aid to help offset the yet to be seen effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This rocked markets today and markets plummeted further as President Trump warned that the outbreak could last until July or August.

The Coronavirus – The market does not like uncertainty but we can see that China and Korea are already improving as the reported cases has flattened in both countries. Both these countries imposed quarantining on the population so we should assume, other countries can contain if they practice the same whether be it government mandated or self-imposed.

The Market – While dramatic moves are very hard to witness on short-term day-to-day basis, what is really important is how our portfolios will be priced a year and more from today.

Our long-running bull market has ended and we have a lot of unknowns that can be solved quickly when transmission stops, treatments prove successful and vaccines are created.

Portfolio Strategy – We are long-term investors by trade and training. Buy and Hold is absolutely proven to outperform picking tops and bottoms. We have long been tweaking our investment models to stave off market correlation and pullbacks. We have durable investment portfolios that are holding up very well and the value of staying invested is that we get to participate in market snapbacks that will indeed occur when we start to see containment progress coming to a state near you.