ETF For those that DO time the market a bit, opinions?

I strongly disagree all the shares I bought 30 and 50 years ago all turned to crap after the business's matured all 6 of them without exception. Pivot bought for 50c became IPL got 10 for one and went to $ 180 now worth about $2.00 after inflation less than I bought them for. AMP was about $6 now SFA. bought Vic Grain for 5c became Grain Corp went to about $16 after maturing and making ship loads of profit failed to reinvest became uncompetetive let competitors in and lost monopoly I bailed out and bought a property and the shares are only about $8.00 now. Other companies bought for 5c were taken over by multi-nationals for around $16 and dont exist any-more. A classic is kodak hanging on to that wouldnt give much. generational wealth. I realized 10 years ago after holding for 3 years STW was crap luckily I sold it. Holding ASIA after XI put restriction on the companies to stop them getting to big would be stupid I doubled my money on that and sold before it halved and put funds into HACK and NDQ and doubled my money again by going in and out. I dont see the point in holding shares forever. I have sold down about every 5 years bought property used depreciation , tax loss harvesting and tax free threshold to eliminate GC tax and reset cost base which reduces tax as you can realize more cash at low tax rates. Never cared about dividends until recently , because selling and converting CG to property to access funds via LOC and rent gave more funds for living expenses. Yeild compression has changed that. You need a lot of money to start with, lots of time and need to be very frugal to live of dividends. You will also become very overweight and loose out when the inevitable crunch comes if you dont sell down after values get toppy. I wouldnt hold more than 20% in one company. Even companies like A2M,Touch Corp and Afterpay run their race with in 10 years

 

I have bought my share of share duds, worth much less than I paid, all the way down to nothing. I bought AMP, sold at a loss, bought again, sold at another loss. The last sale was around double the current trading range, so I'm happy that I go out when I did. One company went bust, took seven years to write off the value to zero. Other shares have boomed, up 10-15 times.

If I was starting again I would use stop-losses and monitor companies more closely. My first share buy was around $2000 paid in cash to my full service broker. I started small and very slowly accumulated shares and property. Research and waiting were essential for me.

Property has been better on a bigger scale. I sold one IP to buy the PPOR. The IP has gone up a little and the PPOR has gone up a lot. Most of my property has gone up a lot.

 

I strongly agree, personally I don’t buy penny stocks so not really exposed to that end of market, when managing portfolio personally I have a value focus, over certain size of company, say ASX300 sorts of size. Liquid, profit making companies with good fundamentals I would target, with max position size 5% of portfolio. I would certainly sell and add new position when required if/when managing personally.

My points above about long term investments are in Superannuation which I don’t mange personally and I consider a long term strategy, mine is value oriented which sorts wheat from chaff, so risk of ruin of one or more “dogs” in portfolio is just noise. There are hundreds of stocks in that portfolio , that’s my long term, what I consider low risk portfolio where eventually I will use for cashflow to live off once I am able to access.

Property is also part of the journey for me, and I also have super concentrated highly volatile investments which I manage and feed lump sum amounts into less volatile property and super over time, slowly reducing risk and volatility and building the long term nest egg.

Not so different in many ways, but hopefully we all get there in the end, so many ways to “skin a cat” as they say

 

I would add, when going down the road of stock picking my preference is to have a very thorough vetting process. Without one in my view is basically a coin toss. Which can work ok also if you have sound money management skills.

I prefer a rigorous method focused on fundamental value companies, not growth stocks, combined with good money management to select and then manage a personal stock portfolio.

Still concentrated however to around 15-20 companies max.

 

And importantly, there is a time for Coffee

 

Today's Market Mood:
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Some more deliberations and personal opinions on BTD.

The bigger drop I wait for the less money I make.
In % terms buying the dip will always beat the market, but if I'm waiting for a 30% drop in the index my buys will be very few and years apart.

As an eg if I have 100k account for buying the dip and decide to buy 10k of index after a 10% drop and DCA another 10k every further 10% drop.

In % terms I'll beat buy n hold, in dollar terms probly not. There won't be enough entries unless there's a world wide market crash.
if it drops from 100 to 90, my buys levels would be 90,81,73,66,59,53,48,43,39,35.
Will the index ever drop 65%...we're all screwed if it does so I'd never really get all the capital in.

If I get 2 buys in, and it goes up to 110 then I have a gain of 28.6% on 20k which is 5,720.
If the remaining 80k was in an account @5% then it's 5,720 + 4,000 = 9,720.

The person fully invested will be square and have around 110k + 5% divs = 115k.

If I was using an LOC or offset then I only made 5,720 (less 7%+ for time held)... about 1/3 of the fully invested.
And if divs increase propertionally then they increase by 15% the next yr for the fully invested.

So buying the dip is basically like a game of chicken. When do I buy, how much etc.
And chances of beating the fully invested only increase with a bigger dip or crash.
A long depressed market buying with an LOC or offset will likely give me bugger all profits and could be a loss while the fully invested will have unrealised losses but probly still enough dividends for devon sandwiches and coffee. And possibly keep DCAing withother income.

Obviously having the static cash currently giving 5% is nice and give more options in more time.
As markets drop rates may drop too making reallocation more pressing.

And so sands through the hourglass...yada yada

 

Following this thread and still deciding if I should buy VGS or IVV now as market is down 5 or so percent or wait till it’s down 10%. Holding no equities at all and I don’t want to miss out on the election year’s rally. I am really finding it mentally difficult to invest smsf that my wife trusted me to invest.
I don’t take any comments as financial advice- so is everyone buying or waiting for a correction and buy in 3rd quarter?

 

Just bought some NDQ etf as I don’t have any. VTS is cheap at the moment compared to ATH. Hard for me to add to my VTS holdings as I added a lot to it during Oct 2024 dip when it was $330. Thinking of DCA down on NDQ etf this week. Buying a little each day. If it drops further I will increase the buys. Waiting for the earnings reporting.

 

$NDQ so far corrected just over 5%. How likely to test the 2021 top and then start the rally in November?
I think anyone who didn’t buy 2023 dip will find difficult entering now.

 

Took a position today on $NDQ and $IVV.

 

I bought some more NDQ etf today too

 

Just a reminder, a lot of people who want to BTFD in the Bull Market are frozen into inaction and end up missing the BTFD opportunity because suddenly the market shoots back up quickly.

So if you plan to "time the market", be ready to act on your plan instead of being too greedy.

 

But neither of you were too brave enough to load up on $GGUS and $LNAS

 

The delay in XFER'ing funds to your trading account doesn't help

 

Just ask yourself "what would ole Jack Bogle do?...

Or be like uncle Wazza and "wait indefinetly. We will only buy if we're getting something attracive"

BTFD imo would kinda look like this.

If I was to just keep throwing money at an investment for years or decades I'd rather do it with leveraged real estate. During down markets of course.
Well at least for the first couple decades.
Using 100% equities would not be my preferred choice for building wealth over a few decades.

An interesting related book, with a tacky title


Most people with large index holdings made the money elsewhere and then parked in index funds.

 

That's why I use same bank as my broker Stake's bank. (ANZ) It's almost instant.

 

We’ve got a large amount of cash at the moment . Renovating our IP’s that need renovating , about to finalise renovating our PPOR .

Buying stuff we want when we want it .

Dont want to think about investing in another IP at the moment .

when we finish our spending we will still have a large amount . Will check out the property market to see if there is anywhere worth buying from a timing the market view point and we may buy 1-2 at that stage . The other option is to put more into super and start doing some diversification into EFT’s / shares etc .

currently it’s all sitting in bank accounts earning 4.75 - 4.9 %

we have pushed our comfort limit by putting money into an ANZ plus account which you can only access via your phone ( one phone only - apparently better for security ) . That’s the 4.9 one .

We have split it between different banks to keep the amounts under the 250 k bank guarantee limit , as we’re not used to having that amount of cash .

cheers

cliff

 

But this is my chart, do I just keep waiting?

 

How about the guy who started in 1990, does he really have to wait 8 years to buy a dip?