The 2018 NFL regular season is over, and so it’s time to take a look back on my division winner picks to see how I did. Since I have nobody to compete against this year, I’ll be competing against my score from last year when I get a respectable 10 points. As a reminder, here is the scoring system: 5 points are awarded for correctly picking the division winner 1…
Ouch. It’s hard to think of any other way of describing the start to the Freedom Portfolio. It’s also hard to think of a better way of describing the performance of the stock market over the past month. As of the time of this writing, the all-time high for the S&P 500 was September 20th, 2018. That was about a week and a half before the official start of me tracking the performance of the Freedom Portfolio. I couldn’t have picked a worse starting time if I tried.
I enjoy investing and think it’s a lot of fun, but sometimes responsibly buying and holding a diversified portfolio of companies can admittedly get a little dull. Fantasy Investing can help with that a little bit, but sometimes I just want to make utterly irresponsible and recklessly bold predictions without having to actually risk any money on them because, well, they’re most likely going to end up being wrong.
Have you heard the doomsday stories about how unprepared Americans are for unexpected expenses? The numbers vary: 40% can’t cover a $400 expense, most would go into debt over a $500 expense, only 39% can cover a $1,000 emergency. They all tell a similar story, though: many Americans don’t have any significant source of savings that they can draw upon.
The year is coming to an end. For many people that means it’s time to come up with new year’s resolutions. Some might be thinking of tax loss harvesting, using up the remainder of their FSA balance, or maxing out an IRA contribution. Those are all very noble endeavors. I’m looking forward to (and simultaneously dreading) the first quarterly check-in for the Freedom Portfolio. One other thing I am looking forward to? Starting the first annual Paul vs the Market Fantasy Investing season.
The past few days have seen a steadily increasing drumbeat of speculation and rumor and “news” regarding when the trailer for the next Avengers movie is coming out. The hottest new rumor has it coming out on Wednesday, December 5th, although if it doesn’t come out then it wouldn’t be the first (or second or third) time that the rumors have been wrong. Either way, interest in the trailer for…
It seems like an eternity ago that Amazon (AMZN) was above $2,000 a share and was the second US publicly traded company to hit a $1 trillion market cap. In reality, it was a mere two months ago. Since then, the market has taken a tumble, with Amazon falling particularly hard, losing about a quarter of its value to sit at around $1,600 a share.
Disney (DIS) reported their third quarter earnings on November 8th and they were pretty good, especially for a company the size of Disney. One of the reasons I like the company as an investment is how impressively diversified they are in how they make money (TV shows, movies, amusement parks, toys) and how they seem to excel in all the different things they do.
*Warning* Spoilers abound for all of the Harry Potter movies and spin-offs. A few years ago, I was watching the (at the time) newest Harry Potter film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them . It was a fairly entertaining film, although I do think it suffered from Star-Wars-Prequel-itis in that it sometimes seemed more focused on using CGI to bring another world to life instead of simply telling a compelling story….
Have you heard of FANG before? It’s a common acronym for some of the largest technology companies in the United States that have had massive gains over the past few years. The acronym has gotten a little messy thanks to the desire to add Apple and the re-naming of Google as Alphabet, but here are the companies traditionally thought to be a part of the “FANG stocks” :