Your Financial Life is ALL about CASH FLOW!
Think about this - you can only spend your annual cash flow minus taxes. I have yet to meet anyone who desired to spend all their money. After all, who wants to run out of capital?!
Contrary to most everything you have heard and read from the financial industry - life is NOT about investments!
Please do not misunderstand - investment positioning remains important. However, in our view, cash flow is King!
Taxes, like death, impact life in a very negative way! Taxes eat away at cash flow. In some instances, the proper word description is "devours" cash flow.
Therefore, we view your future in light of the cash flow you must generate in order to afford and enjoy an "ideal" lifestyle. If you think in terms like these, proper investment positioning begins to become much more clear and understandable. Viewed from a tax perspective, the choices from which to select investments become more limited and very clear.
Risk
Every person tolerates investment losses differently. The financial industry classifies investors in typical pigeon holes with labels such as speculative, aggressive, moderate and conservative. You may have determined one of these labels for yourself or some combination that describes your personal uniqueness. We believe - labels are useless. We will explain this belief.
Our experience over the past forty plus years has taught us that labels may fairly describe an investor's attitude as long as investment markets provide gains rather than losses. However, when the proverbial "stink hits the fan" and significant price declines continue to eat away at capital, attitudes quickly change. During such periods, when markets produce more losses than gains or a major negative price correction has occurred, labels mean nothing. Everyone becomes "conservative" during those times.
Everyone wants a portion of the gains when markets experience positive returns. While no one wants to lose during periods of price declines. That is human nature. But can anyone expect both results?
We Believe You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It Too!
Investment markets are not predictable. However, markets do follow "trends" that are fairly easy to determine. Following trends does not require us to become predictive. We are not required to predict interest rates, guess which asset classes to include in a portfolio or rely on past performance as a guide for the future. After all, you have likely read or heard that past performance has no bearing on future results. That statement is true! So why do advisors attempt to make predictions? Because that is the theory they were taught to follow. Making such predictions is a form of mental blindness. And we all know that one blind person leading another blind person will eventually result in both falling into a pit.
We have chosen a different approach. By watching trends, investors and advisors have a means to know when to:
1. Stay away from risky investments (Cash is King! and trends show limited potential reward for bold risk-taking)
2. Take a measure of equity risk (Trends suggest the odds for reward are somewhat greater than risk of losses)
3. Increase their exposure to risk (Trends suggest risk of losses appear more remote than the reward of gains)
4. Go all in with equity risk (Trends support an old adage, "back up the truck and unload")
We consider this a "tactical" approach to investing. Tactical comes from nautical language and means we react to the prevailing "investment winds." Our tactical approach means we have no fixed percentages in any investments, we have no fixed holding periods, we do not care how markets performed in the past (past is 100% irrelevant), we react to trends, and we attempt not to lose money. Thus, we seek to limit losses by following trends that tell us currently how investment markets are behaving rather than predicting what the market may or may not do.
No one can predict what investment markets will do! But we can react to current trends and adjust our risk exposure accordingly. If this sounds reasonable to you, please contact us at your convenience. We enjoy meeting new people.