Abolutely correct. Would be a pain, if it happends by retirement. But luckily, 95% of your monthly contributions went into VT
Well, one could rebalance once the LEFTs have an substanical value or something like that.
Abolutely correct. Would be a pain, if it happends by retirement. But luckily, 95% of your monthly contributions went into VT
Well, one could rebalance once the LEFTs have an substanical value or something like that.
I won’t discuss suitability of Nasdaq index as an investment. But borrowing 120% of portfolio’s value on one hand and investing 40% of it into fixed income on the other hand sounds like a way to construct a portfolio with 1.4x leveraging and embedded loss on interest rate difference. Which can be achieved by 80% unleveraged and 20% 3x leveraged ETF, borrowing only necessary 40%.
No comments about the rest .
Yeah, that’s why the amount I’d commit is very small. It’s a lottery ticket. Like crypto, just backed by real companies and not images of cats.
Regarding why not UPRO, because when you binge, when you sin, you gotta do it right. No half arsed measures. Maybe not even TQQQ, go for FGNU, as I don’t like anything about the NASDAQ anyway.
Edit: volatility decay is compensated in bull runs, but yes you lose value if it trades sideways.
What? What you talkin’ about? (“are” purposefully omitted to illustrate degen speaking style).
No really, sir officer sir, you’re right, it’s objectively just value averaging scantily clad with something appearing boring (1x bonds) which, as @Tony1337 said is not like TMF which is meant to be uncorrelated to hedge, which could be had more efficiently AND WITH WAY LESS FUN
Just asking
Is investing on margin (on sustainable basis) really a good idea ?
In one video he says that to get returns over the market ones, you have to either concentrate or leverage. I think it was that video.
But somehow everyone is talking about concentration in investing, while avoiding leveraging.
It convinced me to employ some leverage.
Mind you, it was probably the only time in my life that I made a decision based on the content of a YouTube video .
Will try to get into this to understand more.
Isn’t it a matter of allocation?
For me one reason would be to be able to rebalance (since you can’t rebalance out of pillar2 unless you have a 1e or vested benefit account). But that would be temporary if I’m still accumulating as all the accumulation would pay the margin.
Personally not trying to beat the market (and I wouldn’t want the volatility of a 100% equity portfolio, wouldn’t sleep well).
Actually I never completely understood how to calculate asset allocation when using debt as well.
All my assets are simple assets -: Equities, RE funds, Bonds , MMF
But how to account for debt correctly?
At least for me a margin loan in CHF is similar to a negative entry for a high yield CHF MMF.
Wouldn’t make sense to have one of you also have CHF.
Ahh I see. So debt can simply be considered a negative MMF or maybe negative Bond.
Never thought of it this way.
Somehow I keep thinking debt is on other side of balance sheet and has its own dynamics
If you don’t, very well. But if you are doing all kinds of allocation shifts (= concentration), with the goal to increase your returns (!): overweight US, small cap values, individual Mag7 positions - you might as well just leverage everything. The result should be more predictable.
That’s the point that I took out of that video.
Leverage means you get out of the safety zone where nobody can force you to sell your assets, i.e.: you might have to sell low even if you don’t want to. How likely that is and how it compares to the potential additional profits one can have is a matter of risk and profit assessments.
Things that could happen (not comprehensive):
you could have an urgent need for money and need to sell assets, having to sell more of them than you otherwise would because of leverage (bad thing happening in your life, support for family/friends, etc.)
the value of your assets can go down, forcing you to add new funds or deleverage. With a standard margin requirement of 100% (one can borrow up to the same amount as one’s initial assets, equity multiplier = 2):
.
For a 1.1 equity multiplier, it happens after a drop of 81%
For a 1.2 equity multiplier, it happens after a drop of 66%
.
Note that as major market drops tend to happen slowly, you would probably have the opportunity to invest more assets during the drawdown, making your stack able to withstand lower drops (that is if you still have money to invest and can manage the psychological barriers and/or familial pressure to/against doing so).
The lender can unilaterally change the conditions of the loan, requirering more margin at the worst of time or, potentially most disruptive, deciding that your collateral is not safe enough for them anymore and writing it off completely, at which point, you would have to either close the loan or sell your collateral to buy something else that the lender would agree to be agreeable collateral.
You can be subject to psychological tensions that can make your life way harder and/or push you to sell at the worst time or buy additional assets on margin at higher prices.
You can be subject to the risk tolerance of other people in your life (most prominently life partner) that may put pressure on you and prevent you of buying when you should or forcing you to sell when it would not be a good time for it.
A mix of the previous factors can happen. Shit tends to compound in hard times (loss of revenue due to a recession, loss of asset values due to a joint market crash, lender tightening their margin conditions due to the increased risk of default of their borrowers and life partner suddenly not liking that very risky asset allocation they did agree to when times were nice and it brought home outsized returns).
One thing to keep in mind, at least when it comes to IBKR (I haven’t checked other brokers) is that margin accounts don’t benefit from the same protections than cash accounts (mainly regarding segregation of assets).
The main thing I’d keep in mind is that when using margin, the bank/custodian has a hand on your assets → they’re subject to the will of other people than yourself. Not investing money we’re not willing to actually put at risk goes double when the investment is done on margin.
I’d say it depends on the need, ability and willingness to take risk. In my opinion, the need factor is the one that should guide a decision to invest on margin or not. People with very high need for higher returns might consider it. I wouldn’t do so based on simply having the ability and willingness for it as I think the changes of dynamics between cash and margin investing requires a very high motivation to make them worth it.
On a side note, there would also be a tax factor if we were subject to capital gains taxes (there is also a tax factor in the current Swiss situation but I don’t think it moves the needle in a significant way): live, borrow and die is a legitimate rich saving-investing-spending strategy that does use margin to finance purchases.
Me too, as he’s usually a party pooper pooping on all potential fun stuff, same video.
I remember the backtests/studies suggesting up to 2x to be the golden mean, is that what you’re using? Something like SSO for example.
This is also how you would backtest a levered portfolio on testfol.io
Example to backtest 150% stocks you‘d take
150% VTSIM
-50% Cashx
Cashx is the basic $ cash return = mmf
It‘s cheaper to hold 50% UPRO and 50% VTI than 100% SSO.
Btw those are instrument for short term speculation (days), no long term holding.
I dont see why you cant hold UPRO or SSO longterm. You just need to implement them in a portfolio context.
The issue is that they don’t behave like a long term leverage, you’ll be killed when the market gets volatile (like last week).
example: SPY over last month down -4.46% (x3 = -13.38%), UPRO down -17.63%.
you just need to have a proper rebalancing schedule.
For example, besides cost, holding 50% SSO & 50% cash rebalanced daily is the exact same as holding 100% VOO
Backtest to showcase (I artifically reduced the SSO cost to match VOO’s cost with a -0.8% on drag):