Personally, my strategy is to try to have the same allocation between my securities account and my 3a. But I think that, in the end, the best strategy for me would be to go back to the good old Viac Global 100, which is performing well; at least that’s what I’ve noticed with my partner.
Some food for thought -: BUY THE DIP & the small print
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It may just all be a misunderstanding of his unique way of winning over friends and influence people -
“There can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW,” the president posted on his social media website Truth Social Monday morning, saying that “‘Preemptive Cuts’ in Interest Rates are being called for by many.”
I mean, why would Powell worry about a little inflation from dishing out wholesale tariffs to the rest of the world 
?
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To Trump’s credit, and I never would have thought I would have said that ever, I would say that the proper way to handle supply side inflation coming from tariffs is to bolster domestic production by lowering rates (no sarcasm)?
Powell has done an awesome job so far and I’m just a layman so I’ll trust his judgement over mine but I don’t really understand what would be staying his hand if tariffs are there to stay (which they may not and which may be why he’s waiting for more clarity).
I think the thing that’s fairly risky, is that even if in theory tariffs are a one time inflation, the risk is that inflation is partly psychological.
If people think/expect inflation, it might be sticky well above the 2% target, that’s really what the central banks want to avoid. If you lower rates early, it will increase economic activity (and further risk missing the target).
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Indeed.
For almost all US equities the Depository Trust Company (DTC, subsidiory of DTCC, one of the main US clearing agencies) is the central securities depository (CSD) in the U.S and maintains records of ownership at the institutional level (not individual investors) of brokers/custodians that are participants in the DTC system.
Your (direct counter party) custodian (or their sub-costodian) is merely a record in the CSD database (e.g. IBKR holds x securities of US company XYZ).
Your custodian (your direct counter party) in turn keeps record of who of its customer owns which shares that it itself “holds” aka has-an-entry-for in the CSD database (e.g. IBKR “holds” x security of US company XYZ, and IBKR keeps and updates records of who of its customers A, B, … Z hold how many records of the x shares of XYZ).
If you “register” your securities in your name, all that happens is that your custodian (your direct counter party) notifies – usually for a small fee – the issuer company of your shares in the company so the company can send you its annual letter and whatnot.
If some black or otherwise colored swan were to step on DTC, it wouldn’t matter who your (direct counter party) broker/custodian is. DTC ultimately holds them.
More details on the mechanis here: Underlying stock markets mechanics (advanced level) - #48 by Your_Full_Name
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Gold doing some work today huh 
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The actual bear market is not even a month old. Here some charts of the worst bear markets, total return adjusted for inflation:
source: https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/04/04/bear-market-recoveries-q1-2025
It took buy-n-hold over 15 years to get even.
Bear markets are the only time when I do market timing. Because it is worth it. The worst bear market in history would then only have taken like 3 years (which is still a lot), but oh boy, you could make shittons of money after the first sell-off of more than 80%.
As long as the “orange elephant is in the porcelain shop” stocks can hardly rise. If Powell is overturned the dollar is dead, one could just print turkish lira over it. But OK, every company is it’s own currency and I have only debt in dollars.
Most strategies do not work in bear markets. The correlations are simply too high, this time even with the dollar. At the moment I do what Flintstone does on my avatar and what I do best: nothing.
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I think the key difference here is that normally FED would intervene with lower rates if they believed something unplanned (that could not be avoided) happened and now they need to solve the issue
But now they are dealing with a totally one man made crisis driven purely by personal belief system and FED needs to decide if they should intervene to avoid damage done by bad policy or they should ask Trump to revert policy
Sometime back I mentioned that there was a study done to review performance of companies versus media life of their CEOs. The more media savvy CEOs lead a scenario where rather than CEO working for company, company ends up working for the CEO. Such cases lead to lower performances over long term.
Similar stuff is happening in US. Trump wants to be always in news, solve all problems himself and assume himself to be the the smartest one around. So now he expects all US institutions work to make his policies work and not challenge anything.
This is a bad sign.
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Aren’t these bits contradictory? What I understand you’re saying (or, I say I understand because the below is my plan, so I’m biased!) is:
- I time the market by buying (+/- more than usual) because of the opportunity to make more on the upswing (which can take some years) is too good to miss
- I do nothing now because it hasn’t played out, yet
How’d you know when to buy more though, the fabled “capitulation”? I admit I’m planning to use some voodoo of moving averages.
What do you mean by “strategies do not work in bear markets”? Isn’t waiting followed by buying a strategy? And in essence if you’re not selling anything (why would anyone do that unless they had to) a strategy too?
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This is classic Trump. Always find someone to blame
- Inflation was higher in Feb because of Biden.
- Ukraine war was not solved in 24 hours because Biden didn’t stop it, then it was Zelensky‘s fault, now its fault of everyone else that there is no ceasefire.
- Now economy is going to tank because Powell is not acting fast enough to react to damage caused by Trump
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Of course you are right, my strategies, purely mechanical, do have a bear market clause and that did work nice the last few bear markets. It is based on a lot of measurements to decide when the bear market is over.
Moving averages are part of the measurements, I want to see some indices and more than half of the SP500 stocks over, say, the 50 day average.
In backtests the VIX future contango was a nice indicator too.
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Given the case that Trump more or less follows up on what he says -: how likely is that FED chair would be fired?
It seems that market would go insane if that were to happen because that would mean monetary policy wouldn’t be independent in US
DXY in very bad shape & with huge amount of world assets in USD, it’s bad for everyone
One of Trump‘s stated goals is to rebuild US manufacturing and to close the trade deficit in goods.
So you‘d probably want low rates and a low dollar to stimulate investments and exports, plus avoid a recession that would hit your fan base. What better way than to publicly attack your head central banker and work towards ousting him if he doesn’t play ball?
There’s a limited amount of method to the madness, everyone else be damned. Of course, there might be more Truss-moments in our future.
Normally trade deficit leads to country with trade surplus buying US securities (debt, stocks, RE etc). This means that the money from Trade surplus is anyways invested in American companies or debt.
Now Trump wants to force companies to invest in US to make the same goods they would typically import. So rather than investing in US stocks or debt, countries have two options
- invest specifically in the manufacturing capacity rather than other assets
- Reduce the surplus by simply not selling
In both cases capital needs to flow from US treasuries or US stocks to either manufacturing capacity or out of country. I think in both cases it is bad for US assets because they are already inflated
I have read conflicting info about whether the Fed chair can be fired or not. Then again Trump is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow democracy so what’s a few more laws/customs to violate?
I doubt the market would go insane, if anything I feel (again, just feels) that the market is more rational than it was this time last year, where my social media feeds were full of “DEATH OF US EQUITIES”, “SKY IS FALLING TOMORROW”. Yeah…didn’t fall did it? If anything I now see it was all fear mongering without a cause. Now we have a cause, but not one anyone predicted.
I hold my opinion that when earnings come out we’ll have more clarity. People have been dumbed down by social media that everything happens instantly, well, it don’t. If it did I’d like to have long hair again without going through the phase of having a mop for hair for 1.5 years, wife won’t let me 
If Powell is fired, I think investors might not sell out completely but US PE multiples will need to be reduced as investors will demand higher risk premium (similar to other countries where central bank is not independent)
As usual outperformance in equity is driven by unexpected events (the so called not priced in stuff). Who would have thought Trump policies would lead to sell America trade. It’s completely unexpected outcome. Except for Buffet of course 
Exactly, then given the S&P500 is still overvalued you just look at what number it will no longer be that overvalued and that’s, in my opinion, the bottom. 4000-4200 in my opinion as posted above.
Anyone who actually bothered to read Project 2025, it’s all in there. The idea that “he can’t possibly do that!” is somewhat valid, but people need to move on and accept the fact he’s a rich old narcissist with not many years left blighting the earth, likely not getting any anymore so he needs to play with something to keep entertained and have a legacy. Pity this is the POTUS but at the same time oh well. He literally has nothing to lose and doesn’t care about anyone other than himself. Politics and party don’t matter to him. Total loose cannon.
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