Very good question, I’ve thought about it a lot.
What is the purpose of all this cash? To buy cheap stocks (according to the net net rule) when they appear.
If in the meantime I invest it in a stock index fund, the next question is : when will I need the cash for my strategy?
Answer : when there will be a lot more of Net Net stocks, which is very likely to be during a bear market, or a crash.
In that case I will have :
-either to sell my index fund when it has lost money to get my cash, which is far from optimal
-or to not sell, but in that case I won’t have enough cash to invest in my strategy.
As you can see, this is not an easy question to answer. So far I will stay in cash, because my returns are quite satisfactory, even if i am not fully invested. This might however change if I find a better solution.
One of the solutions would be to borrow for net net during bear markets and sell index funds during bull markets to pay off debt. This however would make entire endeavour much more risky and more complicated.
Margin loan in a bear market? That can be a recipe for disaster
The classical solution is 60/40 or similar portfolio, where you put excess cash in bonds, to not lose to inflation and get some modest guaranteed returns. Bonds, especially government, should be un- or low correlated with equities, so you can sell them off with little loss when you need cash to buy low, and that’s essentially what’s done by periodic rebalancing back to 60:40 or another ratio
Not sure about this but borrowing money to invest could make you qualify as a professional trader, in which case capital gains would also be taxed. One of the major reasons for choosing a net net strategy is the absence of capital gains taxes in CH.
Ok, I guess then investing in bonds is better option. I have only objections about bonds, as interest rates will gonna rise soon, as inflation is slowly but steadily growing. Thus it seems that it would be better to find something else for “safe 20%” than bonds. But I don’t know if there exists anything like that.
It accelerates the demise of your portfolio. Let’s say you have $100k own capital and borrowed $100k to buy in total $200k worth of stuff (max of what you can carry overnight). A 20% drop in a single day (black Monday was -22%!) would mean a 40% net loss to you. To recover from it, you’ll now need a whopping 66% gain… And what if it happens a couple of times in a year - 2008 had seen an annual drop of about 40%, it’s a very recent history
By the way, do you have any alternative to government bonds? It seems that government bonds will suck during coming years: inflation growing -> interest rates growing => bond prices/yields go down. Are corporate bonds better option for inflation-protected money equivalent in the current economic environment?
It’s pretty hard to find safe-haven assets that don’t suck these days. But if you don’t have any, you won’t be able to buy low in next recession. Maybe gold and cryptocurrencies?
You could also in some sense consider pension fund and job as bond-like assets, just very illiquid and special. You can cash out pillar 2/3 by moving out of the country or taking up self-employment, and job - you have some guarantees from unemployment insurance on getting paid for 2 years if you stay in swiss job market
They tend to go down together with the stocks, especially high yield.
Ist’s tricky with bond. If the rate rise, the value should go down. But if interest rate rise, more money will flow from stocks to bond. So short term mixed duration bond may not even suffer so much because of all the extra money flowing in.
I have to search for it but I saw a chart of the 60s or 70s where rate were really low and when they increased the value of bonds was almost unrelated. Because with higher rates, bonds were more attractive. So they are not so easy to anticipate, particularly broad index fund. And you have to add the currency effect on it. Really tricky.
Bond prices are directly related to yields, it’s a simple mathematical relationship: cash flows are fixed, the more you pay for them, the less is your return/yield. And yields are related to prevailing interest rates on the market - this is basic economics: if rates rise why should someone buy your low yielder for the same price you paid when they can get a better bargain elsewhere now? You’ll have to lower the price to make its yield match what’s offered on the market for similar bonds, if you were to find a buyer. And vice versa, if rates fall, its higher coupon becomes more attractive and it appreciates in price.
The longer the remaining maturity, the more sensitive prices are to rates changes, as there’s just more future interest at stake. And you always have the option to hold to maturity, pocketing exactly the yield you’ve bought it at, or less if issuer defaults; and this is exactly what index funds would normally do. They only need to trade when money flows in or out of the fund or to reinvest when principal is returned.
Bond market is, like, an order of magnitude bigger than the stock market, influence will be not as big as you think, and it will actually also propagate to the interest rates due to arbitrageurs
More generally, there’s inflation risk - with bonds you’re buying fixed return in a particular currency. In 1980s US bonds paid almost 15%, which is in hindsight a very good rate, but inflation was also high. If things would get out of control and a higher or hyperinflation ensued, you’d be glad to hold on to some real assets like stocks and not worthless fiat money created out of nowhere by central banks left and right even today
But an aggregate index of bonds != from pure bond. The mathematical transformation apply for pure bond, not for index of different bonds of different grade and maturity.
Is just market timing. Prepare you investment plan, and stick to it, and cancel the noise.
With currency effect I meant that if interest rate rise for Switzerland, then the franc is even more attractive and this has all kind of impact on our export/import. We are using interest rate to try to devaluate the franc, not to boost the stock market. So it doesn’t follow the strategy of the Feds.
But I’m sorry we are hijacking Julianek’ Journal
Funds are just sum of parts, exactly same math applies, it just gets more diversified. The more long-term bonds a fund holds, the more sensitive it is to interest rate changes. On the graphs on your page the drop isn’t very visible because the rates start at 6% there, so there’s some baseline profit that would have been made either way - $10k are guaranteed to turn into $16k+ over 10 years of holding
Yet, from the moment that article was written (5 years ago) bond index like AGG returned 2.27% annually. More than US cash on the sideline, and slightly more than inflation (1.8-2%)
You can call it whatever you want, but deviating from your Investment Plan because of some feeling that interest rate “must rise” (5 years I’m hearing this) is still market timing.
Which is ok if you acknowledge it, and accept the consequences. But is not the “truly” passive way of investing that focus on IP and cancel out the noise. And, again, that’s fine if you are fine with it.
But the usual plan (stick to an AA, like 80% stocks and 20% bond), invest automatically and cancel out the noise, that’s what Bogle is about, and for most people that would be fine and much better than what they are doing today.
Hi @Julianek, thanks for sharing the numbers. It’s really great to have the perspective of other guys heading towards financial independence! I am Polish, also living in Zürich. You wrote that you moved in from France to Switzerland, so I assume you are French. For me, when I moved from Poland to Switzerland, it was also a huge boost in my monthly savings. Suddenly, FI at age 40 seemed possible.
Anyway, keep the updates coming. Maybe I will also share my numbers to motivate others. I’m hesitating, were you not afraid that someone would link the facts and recognize you and suddenly they know your how much you earn and how much you have saved?
I thought about this in the past. I realize that I don’t have any money tabou, so I don’t care if people know my financial position. The only question that was pinching me was “What if someone from work recognizes me?”
And then I realize that :
-If this person from work is on this website, then we have most probably the same mindset
-And if this is not the case, and from some reason I would be denounced to my bosses (highly improbable), I have FU-money stashed anyway, so I would not be in a dire situation…
It’s not actually a secret in Switzerland by default - you can ask the tax office for last reported income and wealth of anybody, so long as he hasn’t specifically instructed them to block this data from the public
That’s interesting. Can you really do it? No questions asked? Will the person who is getting checked get informed?
But usually nobody will go through the hassle to check up your wealth if you’re inconspicuous. But if you share this information with the people who know you, they may become envious. Many people go month by month spending all their salary. The only way they could accumulate any wealth is by a fixed-time mortgage. And if the wrong people find out, they may to rob you or con you (I admit that I might have watched too many movies).
Ok, I searched for it, looks like something recently changed and it’s not a default opt-in anymore. But a few years ago it wasn’t like that and I had to fill special form when registering with Gemeinde to request to block this data from the public.
“Die im Steuerregister aufgeführten Werte unterliegen ab dem 1. Januar 2016 dem Steuergeheimnis”
Looks like it may vary by canton, here this link says the tax data was public in ZH, BE and a bunch of other cantons at least as recently as 3 years ago
By reading and partipating to this forum, you confirm you have read and agree with the disclaimer presented on http://www.mustachianpost.com/
En lisant et participant à ce forum, tu confirmes avoir lu et être d'accord avec l'avis de dégagement de responsabilité présenté sur http://www.mustachianpost.com/fr/
Durch das Lesen und die Teilnahme an diesem Forum bestätigst du, dass du den auf http://www.mustachianpost.com/de/ dargestellten Haftungsausschluss gelesen hast und damit einverstanden bist.
