Tag: Indexing

My Thoughts on the “Passive Investing Bubble”

July 1, 2020

One question that I frequently get – in the comments section, via email and in-person – is whether the continued shift away from active stock picking and into passive index investing is all going to create one big, scary bubble. Will this all end in tears? As a member of the FIRE community and a lifelong true believer in passive indexing, it definitely piqued my interest when I heard that I’m (partially) responsible for increasing market inefficiencies and dislocations and potentially even a bubble.

The issue of the “passive investing bubble” bubbles up, so to say, with great regularity. An example is the August 2019 Bloomberg piece “The Big Short’s Michael Burry Sees a Bubble in Passive Investing” likening the current state of the equity market to the crazy CDO market right before the 2008/9 meltdown. Well, that definitely got everyone’s attention! Especially during the slow months in the summer when there isn’t much else going on and financial journalists have to come up with some eye-catching headline!

Long story short, I find that this a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. And instead of replying via email about 10 times a year I just decided to write a blog post about this topic, so I can point to this post in the future if there are people still wondering about my views. That saves me a lot of time and I get to distribute my view to a larger audience, just in case other readers had this same question. And I get into the details a bit more than in a short email reply.

So, why am I not too worried about this shift to passive indexing? Let’s take a look…

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Three Equity Investing Styles that did OK in 2020

April 22, 2020

Recently, I wrote a post endorsing the simple Bogleheads approach: invest in passive index ETFs. Everything else is just mumbo-jumbo, window-dressing and people not understanding the (mostly) efficient market nature of the stock market. In other words…

Simple (indexing) beats complicated active investing

Well, after unloading on some of the fancy complicated investing styles, I just like to point out the select few of them that indeed performed relatively well in 2020. At least better than the index. So, for the record, I’d also like to write about three examples where…

Complicated beats simple index investing

And most importantly, I’m not pulling some “Monday Morning Quarterback” nonsense telling you that if you could have sold your airline stocks in February and replaced them with stocks for video conferencing makers you could have done really well. Well, duh, very few people other than U.S. Senators had that kind of inside information back in February! Rather, I want to write about some of the deviations from simple indexing that were mentioned here on the blog in my posts and/or in the comments. Before the crisis!

Let’s take a look:

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Stuck With a High-Expense-Ratio Fund? Here’s a Google Sheet to Weigh the Pros and Cons of Dumping that “Stinker” in Your Portfolio!

This is a question that’s been on my mind for a while, partially out of curiosity and also because it’s been raised by readers a few times: Suppose you didn’t get the “memo” on passive investing early enough in your life and you now have some high-expense-ratio funds in our portfolio. So, is it too late to switch to a low-cost fund now? Maybe you’re lucky and your funds are actively-managed and they actually beat the broad index reliably. Good for you, but more often than not people are unhappy with the performance of their high-fee funds and like to switch to a low-fee, passively-managed index mutual fund at Fidelity, Schwab or Vanguard. Or move to one of the many index ETFs. Fees will be in the low single-digit basis points, around 0% to 0.015% for some of the Fidelity index funds and around 0.035% for the “Admiral Shares” Vanguard funds. Of course, if this is a fund in a tax-advantaged account where you can just switch between funds without any tax consequences you should just do so if you have that option. But the story gets a lot more complicated in a taxable account! We now have to weigh the pros and cons of switching to a low-cost fund:

Pro: You get rid of that “stinker” mutual fund and replace it with a low-fee, or even zero-fee index fund and eliminate the drag from the high expense ratio. We could be talking about a 0.5% difference in fees and maybe as much as 1.0 or 1.5%. And that’s every year! This can accumulate to a very large pile of cash over time!

Cons: You may have to realize capital gains today. There is a tax inefficiency from having to realize capital gains before you actually need the money in retirement. And this inefficiency takes two forms:

1) for most of you, there’s a good chance that marginal tax rates will be lower in the future, especially in retirement. Your high income right now might put you into a high marginal tax bracket (both Federal and State), while in retirement you might face much lower (or potentially zero) marginal rates. It’s best to defer capital gains until then!

2) even if your future projected tax rate is the same, there’s a potential inefficiency due to realizing capital gains twice; once today when switching to the new fund and once in the future when liquidating that fund in retirement, thus compounding the drag from taxes. It’s best to defer capital gains and pay taxes only once in retirement.

So, depending on how much in built-in capital gains you have right now, how much you can lower your expense ratio and what your current and projected future tax rates are, it may be optimal or suboptimal to dump that high-expense fund. In other words, it is the choice between two evils: The one evil is the drag from the high expense ratio and the other is the drag from tax inefficiency. Which one outweighs the other? Hard to tell, unless you put some numbers in a spreadsheet and do a proper “horse race.” And that’s what we do here today. Let’s take a look…

Continue reading “Stuck With a High-Expense-Ratio Fund? Here’s a Google Sheet to Weigh the Pros and Cons of Dumping that “Stinker” in Your Portfolio!” →

My thoughts on the “Upcoming Recession”

“The recession is near!” Headlines like that have become more common recently. And I’m not talking about those ridiculous “sponsored posts” on Yahoo-Finance (“Reclusive millionaire’s warning: get out of cash now”) but the actual news; the Yield Curve inverted recently and then you add the “Trade War” and weakness abroad and everybody gets nervous. Even the U.S. Federal Reserve is nervous enough to start lowering rates again; one cut already in July and another 0.25% cut likely coming tomorrow! So, will the longest-running economic expansion end of “old age” soon and cause a sizable market correction? Or a bear market? Or a market crash? Should we even care? Since lots of readers have asked me to weigh in on those issues I thought this might be a good time to write a post on this.

First of all, hell yes, we should care. If the economy really goes South and the stock market with it, that would be detrimental for retirees and even folks well before retirement. Fortunately, despite all those bad headlines, I’m still sleeping well at night. Sure, the outlook has worsened since earlier this year and I am a bit more worried about the market now compared to before. But I’m still not too concerned in absolute terms. And my view is mostly based on economic fundamentals. Notice how that view is different from some places in the FIRE community where “no worries” has become something of a mantra. The standard applause line there is that “the market always recovers, so we don’t have to worry about a bear market!” But that’s really a strawman argument. Nobody ever argued that we’ll have a recession and a permanent bear market that we’ll never recover from! The stock market is tied to macroeconomic fundamentals and as long as the economy grows we can be confident that the market keeps delivering. But eventually getting back to the old peak is a pretty lame criterion. Why? Let’s look at the chart below from my post earlier this year, but updated to 9/13/2019. It plots the real (inflation-adjusted) total-return performance (dividends reinvested) of the S&P 500 since 2000.

SPX-Real-TR-Chart
Real, CPI-adjusted S&P500 total return (dividends reinvested) 12/31/1999 to September 2019 (month-to-date). I also marked the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 peaks and troughs and how the index would have performed with an assumed 6% p.a. trend return.

Of course, the market recovers eventually. But it may take a while! The index didn’t reach the 2000 peak until 2013. And a zero-percent real return over 13 years is a pretty lousy goal. Or here is another way to look at the chart: Let’s start at the peak in 2000 and assume the 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions had never happened and the index had instead advanced at 6% per year (even a little bit less than the long-term average). We’d be 50+% richer today. Don’t tell me recessions and bear markets don’t matter! Also, we did catch up to the 2007 peak plus 6% growth, but even that took about 10 years. So, yes absolutely, recessions and bear markets matter because of what they can do to our retirement plans, compliments of Sequence of Return Risk.

I’m just pointing this out to stress that I’m not categorically unconcerned about a recession. I just don’t see enough evidence yet to run for the hills. Let’s take a look at the details… Continue reading “My thoughts on the “Upcoming Recession”” →

Good and bad reasons to invest in individual stocks rather than index funds

Hi everybody! I’m back from a two-week blogging hiatus! Things got busy at the office right before I left and we also had to prepare for our road trip and ERN Family World Tour, currently in beautiful New Mexico and moving on to Texas soon! I was amazed at how little work I got done while traveling! Early retirement is a lot more work than I thought!

IMG_0523_small
In Pecos National Historical Park, New Mexico.

In any case, today’s topic has been on my mind for a while: What would be reasons to hold individual stocks? Not all but the majority of folks in the FIRE community apparently favor just plain passive index investing and I have been an index investor myself for the longest time. But occasionally we should definitely question our assumptions. Especially those that sound like the good old “We’ve always done it this way!” And one “excuse” to look into this topic is the ChooseFI podcast featuring Brian Feroldi a few weeks ago. Brian talked about his adventures as a stock picker! I thought it was a great episode, though, of course, I didn’t agree with everything. But it got me thinking about what would be good reasons and what would be not so good reasons for me to abandon my index-only approach. Let’s look at my favorite eight…

(this post may include affiliate links)

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Here’s an idea for a new ETF

Actually, not one ETF, but two! Or more! How can there be a need for a new ETF? Aren’t there enough already? Earlier this year, Motley Fool argued there are too many ETFs (1,929 at that time, probably over 2,000 by now) and they are covering pretty much every thinkable (and unthinkable) benchmark. Soon we might have more ETFs than publicly traded equities in the U.S., how crazy is that??? Why would I propose a new ETF that doesn’t already exist?

Here’s some background. I’m an index investor at heart and I like tax optimization. For so many years now, I’ve held equity index ETFs and Mutual Funds in both taxable accounts and tax-deferred accounts (both retirement and deferred compensation at work). It’s so painful to see the dividend payments in the taxable accounts getting taxed every year. Sure, it’s only about 1.9% dividend yield in the S&P500 right now but for us, that’s taxed at 15% federal, 10+% state (California!) and 3.8% Obamacare tax, for a total of almost 30% marginal tax! Isn’t there a better way? Sure! Simply put the taxable equity allocation into stocks that pay zero (or close to zero) dividends and keep the high-dividend stocks in the tax-deferred account where they can compound in peace and be taxed only once upon withdrawal rather than every year along the way! So, the two ETFs that I wish existed would exactly replicate the S&P500 if held in equal shares. But individually they’d have non-index weights and one would hold the equities with the lowest dividend yield and the other with the high-yield equities!

Notice that most folks already do this tax optimization across asset classes: Hold the tax-inefficient asset classes (bonds, REITs, etc.) in tax-deferred accounts and equities in taxable accounts. So, why not do this within the equity asset class as well for additional tax efficiency? How much extra after-tax return would we get out of this? Let’s look at the numbers…

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Active Investing: Opportunity vs. Futility

Almost everywhere in life, the word “active” has a positive connotation. An active lifestyle, an active personal life, an active participant in a discussion, etc. In contrast, “passive” stands for low-energy, dull and boring. Imagine setting up a friend on a blind date with a nice gal/guy who has a really great “passive lifestyle” and see how much excitement that generates.

But investing is different. Passive investing is the rage right now! It is a noticeable market trend in finance overall and the Financial Independence blogging world seems particularly subscribed to the passive investing idea. For the most part, I agree with the superiority of passive investing. But then again, not all active investment ideas are created equal. And that means that we are at risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater!

Has the Personal Finance Passive-Pendulum swung too far? Are we willfully ignoring some useful principles from active investing for fear of shaking the foundations of the Passive Investing Mantra? 

Take the following five examples of active investing. They all fall into different spots on the Futility vs. Opportunity spectrum:

  1. Stock picking.
  2. Style investing, i.e., tilting the portfolio toward a theme such as dividend yield, small stocks, value stocks, low volatility stocks, etc., or a combination of them.
  3. Allocation to different asset classes (e.g. stock, bond, cash, alternatives) in response macro fundamentals (P/E ratios, bond yields, volatility, etc.).
  4. Changing the major asset weights over the life cycle, e.g., using an equity glidepath to retirement and even throughout retirement.
  5. Setting the initial safe withdrawal rate in retirement and all subsequent withdrawal rates in response to changing market conditions.
FutilityVsOpportunity diagram
Not all forms of “Active Investing” are created equal!

It would be a mistake to apply the same passive investment mantra to all five aspects of personal finance. So, that’s what today’s post is about: Where should we stay away from active investments and where can we learn something from active investment principles? Let’s look at the five active investment themes in detail…

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