Time
Posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2020
At the bottom, stocks will be cheap and no one will care.”
– Bob Farrell Merrill Lynch Analyst
The value of time. We can’t make more of it. We can’t buy it. T. Boone Pickens, legendary investor and oil wildcatter, gave a graduation speech at his alma mater. In it, he said he would gladly exchange all of his billions, his land, and his private jet to one of the students sitting in audience in exchange for one thing. He would exchange it all for their place in the audience and a chance for him to live his life all over again.
In the mid 1600’s Cambridge University suspended its operations for two years due to the bubonic plague. It was during that time that Sir Isaac Newton came up with his theory of gravity and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus.
This can be an amazing time. This can be time with others, time in meditation, time working out, working on our diet, calling mom or dad or the kids, or even just sleeping. These are the things we should be concentrating on right now. Time wasted will be one of our regrets when we come out the other side of this crisis.
Why do we invest? We invest because we have fiscal needs for which to prepare. We cannot choose the investing age in which we live. Stocks have shown to have the best risk/reward investment returns over time allowing us to provide for housing, education and retirement.
While we saw the early innings of this battle against the virus as a threat to our society the risks are diminishing along with our aggressive response. As for our economy we fully expect to at least technically enter a recession but a quick rise back as monetary and fiscal policies are fired with full force. No one can pick the bottom but know that we are getting better value for our dollar in equities than we were months ago. In a way, the risk in our portfolio is less than it was two months ago.
The way to tell whether the discounting has been fully reached is when the market stops reacting negatively to every bad headline, which has yet to happen. But once it happens, the market can truly bottom and begin to recover when some of the expected negative events fail to materialize, even though it may rally in the face of other “bad” news it already discounted. – Jim Bianco Bloomberg 2/28/2020 Bianco Research
I think we aspire less to foresee the future and more to be a great contingency planner… you can respond very fast to what’s happening because you thought through all the possibilities, – Lloyd Blankfein
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. – Winston Churchill
To learn more about us and Blackthorn Asset Management LLC visit our website at www.BlackthornAsset.com .
Disclosure: This blog is informational and is not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. If you are thinking about investing consider the risk. Everyone’s financial situation is different. Consult your financial advisor.