Paul is going solo in the inaugural episode of a new podcast series: Bad Takes. The internet is full of bad takes on some of the popular media of the day. Paul tackles one of these that has cropped up in the fourth episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Is John Walker the real villain of the series? Listen to Paul’s take, and if you disagree, let him…
It’s the two year anniversary of Paul vs the Market and the Freedom Portfolio. Like last year, I thought I would take this opportunity to replace my quarterly recap with a little bit of a longer look back where I go over the performance of the Freedom Portfolio since inception.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the stock market, as measures taken to combat COVID-19 have effectively shut down large sections of the US economy. Thanks to social distancing, Paul goes solo for this episode to discuss his reaction the historically severe stock market drop and the moves he has been making (or not making) in his own portfolio. Interested in reading more? Then check out Rampant Discourse’s…
President’s Day was this past Monday and so this seemed like as good a time as any to make a brief list of some of the CEOs of companies in the Freedom Portfolio that I most admire. Why? I’ve long thought that we as a society spend too much time and energy admiring (or possibly hating) the President and oftentimes give them far too much credit for things like the economy and the stock market and even larger things like our standard of living. On the flip side, I think we don’t spend nearly enough time appreciating the entrepreneurs and business leaders who take risks and are constantly driving innovation forward.
Over the past two weeks, three companies that make up a combined 23% of the freedom portfolio reported earnings. Here are some quick hits for each:
The fourth quarter was a pretty great one for the Freedom Portfolio, which was up a strong 16% versus roughly 9% for the S&P 500. Since inception, the Freedom Portfolio is now up 11.2% versus 10.4% for the S&P 500. It’s not a huge amount of out-performance, but it’s still a relatively short time frame when it comes to my investing horizon.
Video games are a big deal. In fact, I’ll bet they’re a bigger deal than you realize. It’s always tricky comparing the size of different industries, but at this point it feels pretty safe saying that the video game industry is bigger than the movie and music industries combined, and the gap is projected to only increase in the coming years. Major esports events already draw more viewers than the Super Bowl. Read Dead Redemption 2 had a bigger opening weekend of sales than Avengers: Infinity War (although that record was later smashed by Avengers: Endgame). Netflix (NFLX) considers Fortnite to be a bigger competitor than HBO and Activision Blizzard (ATVI) spent more money to acquire the maker of Candy Crush than Disney (DIS) spent to acquire the Star Wars franchise.
I wrote a book! Okay, so it’s a children’s book, but still… I wrote a book! It’s called Penny Invests, and it’s a picture book aimed at children to try to teach a little bit about the basics of investing in a humorous and lighthearted way.
It’s the one year anniversary of Paul vs the Market and the Freedom Portfolio! I just wish it could’ve coincided with a better performing quarter. The third quarter of 2019 was brutal, and saw the Freedom Portfolio essentially give back all of the gains from the 2nd quarter. The Freedom Portfolio was down 10.5% for the quarter, compared to the S&P being up around 1.7%. I’m still up versus the market year-to-date 22.9% to 20.5%, but am now back to losing to the market since inception (October of 2018) -4.1% to 3.9%.
My family recently returned from a week spent at Disney World, so I figured I would combine my thoughts on our experience with some opining on why Disney is one of the larger positions in the Freedom Portfolio.