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Rob Isbitts shares his thoughts on the market in 2023 and what’s coming in 2024 (1:00) S&P 500, Nasdaq and looking at technical points (14:00) Are small caps a good investment? (24:35) Which ETF is right for you? (30:10)
Transcript
Rena Sherbill: Rob Isbitts, welcome back to Investing Experts. Always great to have you on Seeking Alpha. Thanks for coming on.
Rob Isbitts: Likewise. Thank you for having me back. Let’s get into 2023 as it closes and 2024 as it prepares to begin.
RS: Indeed, indeed. We’re hitting the end of December. You just said before I hit record, this is — you’re calling it the year of living dangerously. So, talk to us about that. Unpack the danger. And hopefully a bit of hope in there.
RI: Because I’ve been asked to do a lot of kind of review, preview kind of things for some different places. And I’ve kind of put them all together to try to give you the best of on this discussion.
So, one of the things I did was, I put together — well, I wouldn’t call it the 12 days of Christmas. But as we’re recording this, we’re approaching that time of year. But what I did is, I put together a list from 1 to 12, and each of these is a number that has some significance at least as of a couple of weeks ago for the year 2023. And if you don’t mind, I will race through them.
Okay. So one, one is the number of trillions of dollars in consumer credit card debt. It’s actually 1.08 trillion. Is it going to matter next year? Depends who you ask? And that’s kind of a theme of the rest of this conversation today.
Two, two heartbreaking war zones, obviously, Ukraine and the other one Israel-Hamas. Hasn’t really affected markets other than suddenly, but let’s see what happens beyond that. Hopefully nothing.
Three, three straight poor years for bond prices. Now bonds have rallied very sharply in just the last few weeks. But generally speaking, it’s been a rough three year period for bonds, and frankly for a lot of stocks as well.
Four, there were four more Fed rate hikes following the seven we had in 2022.
Five, 5% treasury bill interest rates. And by the way, one article concept I have coming up, do people even realize that T-bills out to one year are still well over 5% as we record this. So, with all the other drop, I mean that’s telling me something. I don’t know what it is yet. I just know it’s not normal.
And if you know anything about a yield curve inversion, where longer rates are supposed to be higher than shorter rates, that part is not following along just yet.
RS: What do you — if I can interject for a second, what do you think it might be telling you? If you don’t have the exact answer, what are some of your senses telling you?
RI: My best guess is that it is the continued concerns over the U.S. government being able to fund its debts in the short term because so much of that debt, that 30 — well, I mean, it’s been a couple of days, so it’s probably grown by another half a trillion. So I may be off. But we’re somewhere in the 32 trillion, 33 trillion in debt and I just don’t think that goes away without some weird things happening beyond what we’ve already seen.
In the meantime, I think what that’s telling you is that’s what the government has to offer in order to attract buyers. We’ve had some awful, awful, I mean, like practically failed bond auctions, not in the short term stuff, a little bit longer.
And look, we’ve seen interest rates across the board go shooting higher, started last year and then continued in 2023 here. Now they’re shooting down. I just don’t think that this is over. And I’m not so sure that inflation is over for this cycle, but we’ll probably get into that a little bit. So that’s one through five.
So, I’m an ETF geek. So, I follow this and I think it has implications for all investors. Just like the S&P and the NASDAQ are very crowded at the top, same with the ETF business, the top six issuers of ETFs hold more than 85% of assets. I’m talking U.S. ETFs.
And so it’s this same type of dominance. And as you know, and maybe as listeners know from following Sungarden Investment Publishing on Seeking Alpha we cover ETFs broadly and market strategy, but we have a special kinship with the overlook, the undercover, the under the radar ETFs. And I have a feeling that in the coming years, I think in part because we’re going to give it a lot more attention, that I think that may even out a little bit.
Seven, well, that one’s easy. The Magnificent Seven stocks. That’s what the industry has called them. They have dominated stock performance, really in a way we haven’t seen since the late 90s. Let’s hope that it doesn’t turn out the way it did after 1999 because those of us who are old enough to remember and manage money through it, which I did, 2000, 2001, 2002, all down years for the S&P and all down years for the NASDAQ. Each year, the loss was more than 30%. Yes, kids that’s possible. Because when you lose 33% you have $67 left, you can still lose 33% of that, and so on and so on. It never goes away.
Eight. Eight is for mortgage rates. They’re down now, but they did hit 8%. And so that was kind of the other side of the coin. If you’re a saver, 5% T-bills are awesome. If you’re somebody that is trying to buy a new home, well, this is why the housing market is frozen this year and why homebuilders building new stuff are having a little better time in part because they’re working out massive incentives.
Nine. Again, just an ETF point. ETFs are $9 trillion now globally. And for every dollar that leaves a mutual fund, it’s probably going into an ETF. I say that’s sort of off the cuff, but generally speaking, if you look at the numbers, it looks a lot like that.
So I really do believe that that ETFs are probably the best complement that a stock picking or stock and bond type investor has ever had. I know we won’t cover that too much here because we’re sticking mostly to macro. But I do believe that and $9 trillion can’t be wrong. Isn’t that what they say? And projections are it’s going to grow to 20, 25, 30 over the decade.
So the last three. Ten. 10-year bond, specifically the volatility, it was just off the charts this year and it made stars out of some previously pedestrian bond ETFs. Bonds are acting a lot more like stocks. (NASDAQ:TLT) is an ETF that became kind of the new poster child for, hey, I like bonds and rates are going down. So I want to make a lot of money.
And in reality, TLT covers 20 to 30-year treasuries, but the 10-year is the benchmark. It’s what so many things are tied to. And that type of volatility again says to me, okay, there’s something different going on here. And we haven’t really seen the lag effect of 11 Fed rate hikes.
So the other thing to keep in mind before I get to the last two on this list is that, the lag effects, okay, the consumer at least, well definitely in Europe, I would say almost certainly in Asia and clearly in the U.S. just were such a, here in the U.S. there’s so much income inequality that you’ve got people investing in the stock market, they’re doing fine, and locking in 5% T-bill rates all year. But then you’ve got a massive part of the population that isn’t participating in this and they’re already feeling the lag effects of all those rate hikes.
And I’ll throw this out there just in case we can come back to it sometime next year, and say, oh, you know, Rob, Rob called this. Because I’m not afraid to be wrong because, you get used to it when you do this for 37 years. Here’s a sneaking suspicion I have. Okay. The government needs to keep refunding and better it does it at lower rates than higher rates.
The second thing is, it may be that the Fed knows something that maybe the market doesn’t know yet about liquidity going through 2024, because fundamentals aside, if markets dry up and there’s limited liquidity, Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary just said this a few months ago that the liquidity conditions for the treasury market were pretty awful. Well, if the, sort of bastion of high quality, low risk investing, the U.S. treasury market is getting more and more illiquid or should I say less liquid, that is a problem and it has ripple effects.
So the last two, 11 and 12, and this is as of a couple of weeks ago, it’s changed with the recent rally, but as of early December, of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average, 11 were down. 11. And I still believe the Dow is the best index out there because it doesn’t have the heavy weighting, sort of top heaviness that the others do.
And then finally, 12. 12 is the number of Fed board members who talk too much. That’s my opinion. But I remember back when the Fed just did its job quietly, financial advisors, investors, we didn’t have to constantly mark our calendars for when somebody was scheduled to give like a mundane talk at an economics club.
So to me that kind of sets up for why 2024 is the year of living dangerously because we have a lot of markets at the crossroads.
RS: In terms of the Fed, thank you for that rundown. In terms of the Fed talking too much, I imagine it’s basically a product of our never ending news cycle and that it’s just constantly having to feed the machine. And so everything is talked about and pondered about and commented on.
But there’s also these questions, people looking at the market, investors looking at the market, prognosticators looking at the market, in terms of what the Fed is promising and then maybe walking back a little bit and other people are maybe trying to subvert expectations and you alluded to that a bit.
How should – and there’s definitely I think an overwhelming opinion about rates being cut in the coming year. How do you think investors should be parsing the never ending news cycle, the never ending comments? How should they be parsing that and how should they be planning for it?
RI: Well, if you don’t mind, I will answer that as part of, let’s say, a broader approach to what I would call investing for modern markets.
Because you bring up a very good point. I mean, sometimes I sit there watching the Fed obsession or Fed dissension, maybe, if we can get that trending, I don’t know. I wonder to myself, like, isn’t there anything else going on? Aren’t there companies doing business? I mean, it doesn’t all revolve around what overnight interest rates are, which is all the Fed is really responsible for anyway, everything else is a narrative, and that is absolutely because of the 24/7 news cycle and everything in your face, from your phone, et cetera.
But I actually will say I don’t agree that the Fed has to do this. I think they could keep quiet a little bit more because let’s face it, the market’s kind of doing their work for them right. When you see the 10-year go from touching right at 5% which by the way, as a technician, since my dad taught me when I was a teenager, 40-something years ago, I get a special chuckle when I say, oh, the 10-year is going to go to 5%.
Then let’s see what happens. Why, because it’s a freaking round number. And that and trend lines and support and resistance all the basics of technical analysis, it all comes through. And as we’ll discuss, I think before we’re done here, there’s a few major markets that are a technical point.
So as people look into this year, think about it this way, let’s don’t let the recency effect get in the way of making cogent, responsible, disciplined, unemotional decisions in 2024 and beyond. Why do I say that Rena? Because we’ve had two years in the stock market where they basically netted out to zero return. If you look at what the major averages did in 2022, plus 2023, through maybe 10 days, 8 trading days left in the year or something like that, they basically netted out to almost zero. The – or worse.
Small caps are down, emerging markets are down 10% to 15% as of recently over the last two years, everything else it’s flat. But the problem is this recency effect makes it so that people want to look at what just happened and ignore that 2023 was simply the year where we got back to even.
It’s kind of like your sports team having an awful start to the season, they recover and win a lot of games in a row. But all they’ve really done is get back to 500. So that I think is it. And so again, kind of going, if you don’t mind, I’ll walk through some of these key decision points from a chart standpoint.
And I’ll pull them up one at a time here. So I’m looking at the S&P 500 right now, approaching all-time highs. I don’t use phrases like bull market and bear market very often and I won’t hear. All I’ll say is, I don’t think that there is a significant long term meaningful trend change in the S&P until it breaks through 4800 and does so with gusto and with sustainability.
What has happened recently, and I think this is because we technicians are not sort of lonely voodoo artists like we were 20, 30 years ago. Everybody seems to be a technician, everybody’s calling for the same levels. Which is why that group think is something I think as an investor you can really take advantage of by not following the crowd, but knowing what the crowd is following if you will.
So, S&P 500’s rallied all the way up. It’s 4760 as we’re speaking. I don’t want to see 4800. I don’t want to see 4850, 4870 and then right back down two days later. I want to see a run that looks like it’s going to just sort of rip through 4900 to 5000 and then really, really take off. And I don’t discount the possibility that that could happen next year, especially early in the year.
Now, if we look over at the NASDAQ, okay, the NASDAQ is right spot on. It’s all time high. I wrote an article recently called, it’s the Nasdaq’s Formula 409 because 409 rounded is about where it was. And hopefully this will not be as messy as the things you clean up with the Formula 409 which is apparently big in the States. I’m not sure if it is across the world, but it’s the all-purpose cleaner.
So, (NASDAQ:QQQ) again, we’re either going to get a rollover here or what I think is probably more likely call it 60/40 in favor, is that we will burst into the New Year ala early the year 2000 where the NASDAQ had already ripped higher like it did last year, this year, I should say. And by the way a quick aside, the NASDAQ was down about — in round numbers, the NASDAQ was down about a third of its value last year. It’s up about 50% give or take this year. So if you do the math, you had $100, it turns into 66, 67 and then you increase that 66 by 50%, you’re right back at 100. And that’s what I was talking about before.
So the Qs, one of the scenarios I think is possible for next year, is a very 2000-like scenario. That will be awesome for people who can think of investing as weeks to months. If they think of it in terms of years, it is going to be absolutely miserable. And here’s why. If history rhymes, is not going to repeat, but it rhymes, you could see the NASDAQ, I mean, go flying higher, I don’t know, put a number 15%, 20%, 30%, 40% maybe. Okay.
This is what happened in late early 1999, early-2000. And then that was it, all the good news was out, and what happened in the NASDAQ from March of 2000 to March of ’03, 3 down years in a row, a total loss of, I don’t know, 80% something like that or more. And three straight down years of at least 30%. I am not predicting that, but I am saying that there is a reasonable possibility as we sit here right now that you could have that kind of pop and drop type of scenario.
A couple more, I’ll cover quickly. Because I think they’re interesting technically, and I think they help explain. If you don’t look at the charts and you’re kind of, I think operating a little bit blindly as an investor. So I…
RS: Before you get into the other charts, can you explain to investors that aren’t adept at technical analysis or don’t even know why they should be, can you explain why it’s so important to recognize the patterns from a technical perspective?
RI: Yes. Yes. And I’m so glad you asked it exactly that way, Rena, because this is the overall theme for how I think of investing. Okay. I may be an ETF geek, but I manage money for three decades and I’m a strategist at heart. So I always kind of look at the bigger picture. And then operate within it. Well, what has changed over the last few decades and especially over the last three years, probably since the pandemic, is that there is a widening gap between what probably should happen.
I can give you a long laundry list of risk factors. Starting with an overspend consumer in the U.S. which drives so much and so many other things and the debt problems. So there’s — you have to look at markets now, I think as what should happen logically and the gap between that. And what actually does happen. I think is going to be and has been greater than we’ve ever seen it. And I just think that’s modern markets because they’re different participants.
So why technicals? Well, this may not be common knowledge to let’s say the typical stock picker, buy and hold investor. But you’re not playing in the same playground that you did for the longest time. So much money has gone into following indexes. And if you’re ever wondering why? Wow, my — I don’t know, biotech stock, just to pick an example out of the air, my biotech stock had a nice quarter. They’re doing well. They’re fundamentally inexpensive.
Why aren’t they getting any love? Why are they falling? Well, it could be because there’s a lot of money indexed to biotech and they’re one of the biggest stocks in the index. So if money has decided it’s leaving biotech for whatever reason, your biotech stock is going down with the ship and this is what happens. This is how you get early 2020, S&P falls 33% in five weeks. Nowhere to hide.
And it’s that nowhere to hide thing that I think should have people hypersensitive to, again, how I use technicals. I don’t use it to try to predict the future. I use technicals primarily to figure out where major risk is because I believe as an investor that you can make money on anything at any time. It’s not right or wrong, it’s how much risk is attached to the reward that you are seeking.
And there are so many factors like the indexation, hedge funds, even the emergence of day traders and zero DTE options, days to expiration, okay. There’s just so many more types of movements going on because of how markets have modernized and that brings opportunity for sure, but it also brings risk and it makes it so that buy and hold, it’s okay, but it should be buy and hold but keep your eyes peeled at every turn. So I hope that that answered the inquiry.
RS: Yeah, I think it did. I think it also dovetails nicely with your two — like main points of focus with the ETF space and technical analysis. It seems that the preponderance of the ETF space, the growth there is in direct correlation to why we need technical analysis now more than ever.
RI: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And frankly, once again, completely unrehearsed, you kind of led right into where I was going to go next, which is the small caps. Subject of much discussion.
RS: It’s made people happy, it’s made people sad.
RI: That’s right. And at the same time, by the way. That is actually true because I mean, just that look, there’s a bunch of academic studies going back. There are lot of people sort of sunk their teeth into.
And there was a big prominent mutual fund company that’s now moving their way rapidly into ETFs. One of the sort of later adopters of that. And they prided themselves on small cap value is the best thing ever for the last 50 to 70 years. Well, I would say, I don’t think we did everything from our phones for most of the last 50 to 70 years. And I don’t think that people were using leverage the way they use it and the options market was much more nascent than it is now.
So anyway back to the small caps, okay. When people just say, oh, okay are small caps a good investment? Well, the usual answer in investing, it depends. So I’m looking at (NYSEARCA:IWM), which used to be the dominant, the only name in small cap investing, tracking the Russell 2000 Index.
So IWM is the symbol and it has basically traded between 160 and 200 continuously going all the way back to, looks like April of 2022. And that’s pretty much all it’s done for a living. Is going up and down between $160, $170 and up to 200. Well, guess where it is right now, 200 spot 18, $200.18 as I’m speaking.
So do I know where it’s going to go next? It is surely overvalued. But I learned a long time ago that overvalued can kind of get pinned as they say in technical parlance and it can stay overvalued. So I don’t know if IWM is going to take off and hit an all-time high, which is more than 20% above where it is now, or if it’s just going to do the same thing that it always does.
Kind of like Charlie Brown and the foot — and Lucy and the football, the analogy I use a lot. Just when you think it’s going to break out to a new level above $200, back it goes. They pull the football away and you’re back down to $160, which last I checked is a 20% decline. So this is like one of those, it could go 20% either way, Rena.
And so, as a technician, I’m not going to just go and say, well, it’s fundamentally cheap or I like these stocks in it or whatever or I’m not going to worry about the long term because you don’t want to start out 20% in the hole because 20 could beget, 40 could beget, 50.
The other thing about small caps before I wrap up the small cap portion of the show is this is – and bleep this out if you need to okay. But there’s small cap and there’s small crap. And IWM, and I’m certainly not the first one or the last one to say it, but IWM, which a lot of people blindly follow and say, okay, I want small cap exposure.
Let me plug this in for X percent of my portfolio. Well, something like 40% of the companies in the Russell 2000 have big debt issues, may not survive a period of high interest rates, lot small banks in there, things like that. So it’s — and by the way, that’s why they’ve done so well recently because it was — these things aren’t going to go to heck. Okay. A relief rally. But where has it gotten you technically? Just back to where it’s been four or five times since April of last year.
So it’s meaningless except to short-term traders because all it’s doing is confining itself to its own little box, its own little range. And in the small cap space, there are other places to look, (NYSEARCA:IJR) is a cleaner… Companies generally have to be more profitable to be part of the small cap 600. SP small cap 600 and IJR is one of several ETFs that cover that.
And in the small cap space, the one that has kind of been my go to over the years is symbol (BATS:CALF), which is much more about cash flow, financial stability if you will, finding quality in companies that aren’t the Magnificent Seven. Because you know the Mag 7 are quality. Question is, can they go up forever like helium?
RS: You were saying in one of your 12 days of the markets, let’s call it, you were mentioning the crazy growth that the ETF space has seen. You mentioned a few ETFs just now in terms of how you can kind of best take advantage of things. In terms of the growth of ETFs and also how you’re strategizing around having weight in the market.
Where do you think investors are, or do you think it depends on kind of what type of investor it is, what type of timeline they have, in terms of, are the bigger ETFs the way to go, the indexed ETFs are the — covered call ETFs or the more under covered ETFs that you also cover. Does it have to do with timeline horizon, does it have to do with, as you’ve mentioned before on the podcast in terms of where the investor is in their lifespan? Can you talk it through a little bit?
RI: Sure. Sure. And now, you’ve just thrown me what they call in American baseball, a fat pitch, because for 27 years, I was a fiduciary advisor, fiduciary meaning, client comes first, their needs, everything’s customized, personalized and I was not a financial planner. I was a money manager who could find people to help with the financial planning. And during that time, everything was focused on client A versus client B versus client C and they were all different even though they had enough in common. So that I could run kind of a model portfolio, but adjusted for each person.
Now, fast forward three years since I sold my advisory practice and retired “ha, ha.” Now focus on research and ETFs and education and all the ETFYourself.com stuff that we’re doing. I don’t want to make the mistake that I see and hear so many people making. I mean, last night I was on social media and I was just kind of watching what people were saying and the more brash analysts out there, their attitude is basically, well, I think they were talking about T-Bills. Well, you’re a moron for staying in T-bills.
Well, what if you got so much money that 5%, 4% whatever, okay, and maybe you only need to take, I don’t know, 10%, 20% of your portfolio, and put it at risk. I mean, stock market average is, what, 8% a year, long term, something like that. And you’re almost two-thirds of the way in T-Bills or similar.
I mean, and again, that’s an example of how it’s so personalized, but so much of the industry makes it so that everybody should be doing this, everybody should be doing that. So that’s a long way of saying everybody needs to – I think there’s a major issue which if there were a way to solve it with education in 2024, sign me up because I think the number one thing that the self-directed investor needs to learn is that if you are a self-directed investor, if you are not using somebody that’s in the business that I was in for 27 years, and been out of for three years. The advisory business, professional advisors who are fiduciaries, not brokers and sales people and product pushers.
If you are really a self-directed investor, then be self-directed. Don’t simply say, oh, you said this was a buy. It didn’t go up. Okay. Because that’s where I think there’s such a major miscommunication on all platforms. Okay? I mean, including the one that we’re both active and part of. I think the first thing that every investor needs to do: come up with a philosophy. What is it you’re trying to do?
Second, come up with a process. How do you want to go ahead and do it? Third, come up with a universe, a watch list, a list of possibilities like a sports team saying, okay, some of these people are starting players, some of them are on the bench, but ready to go in the game whenever we need them. And the rest are kind of in our system in our minor league system if you will and then everything else, not part of the organization right now.
And I think that watch list as I call it, or depth chart, is so important, but you can’t just do it out of thin air. This is where you have to go, do your own research, and come up with your own philosophy. And then you can be as opinionated as you want within your philosophy. My philosophy starts with ABL, avoid big loss.
I’ll take myself as an example. With ETFYourself.com, the whole thing was set up so that if people want to see what I’m doing with my own money and explaining it to them in detail as I make the moves, that’s what they can sign up for. And if they – because — what else can you, unless you are managing money for other people, you can only have your own views.
So I start everything with ABL, avoid big loss. What is big loss? Well, in the accounts where I’m more of an investor, once I’m down 10% in something, the alarm bells start going off. Not because 10% is the end of the world, but because if I lose 10% in something, then I have to start to question whether or not I bought it correctly because yeah, there’s an old Wall Street expression that you don’t make money when you sell you make money when you buy.
Buying inexpensively enough. So you can give yourself a cushion. Benjamin Graham, the famous value investor called it the margin of safety. So to me, 10% is kind of that level. But if I’m doing something that’s kind of like a trade, which I do frequently and I run portfolios like that for myself. I’d say in a trade I believe that I’m catching it.
I mean, it’s not timing per se, but what I’m saying is, think of it this way. On a trade, I’m saying, all right, I have to believe pretty strongly that the next 5% move is going to be up, not down. If it’s down, then I have to question my decision. When it comes to an investment, longer term position at 10%.
I think any investment that you consider, if you have the ability, I mean, I created something called the ROAR score which does this. But you have a — you look at it and say, okay, what is the next 10% move likely to be? And how likely is it to be? It’s never 100% or zero as much as people on social media would convince you that things are guaranteed. Nothing is.
So, the next 10% move, if I really, really think it’s going to be up and not down, well that nudges me toward that. Well, what if there’s 20 different ETFs that I’m looking at and they all look that way. Well, now I have to do a little more research. So this is all part of what I call process. And then the last part, after philosophy and process and strategy all the way down to the part that people focus 98% of their time on when they should focus probably 20% of the time on, which is security selection and when.
And blanketing all of that is the fact that, again, I mean, 60 year old semi-retired, okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll be 60 next year, but whatever, 60 year old semi-retired working by choice, et cetera, that leads me to when rates went up the way they did.
T-Bills became my best friend. Why? Because it soaks up a lot of the volatility and danger and you keep it out of harm’s way if you can — I think we talked about this the last time, if I’m not mistaken, just put simple numbers to it. If, I don’t know, two-thirds of your money is earning 4.5%, okay, that’s 3% contribution to your total return.
The other third of your portfolio takes that 3% that you’ve already locked in across the total and pushes it up or down. But if you’re comfortable enough so that you say, all right, I don’t want to lose more than x. Well, you can do the math and I know I’m explaining this a lot faster. Hopefully people don’t have to go and replay this part like five times but – and I’m happy to write about it for Seeking Alpha if folks think that it’s better off kind of laid out.
But that is it for me. It’s people have to do their own research and they have to be self-directed, responsible investors, self-directed investing is not as simple as saying, I will just kick out a few people that got something right one time or two times and they’re the hot dot. That’s why there’s so much indecision and turnover in the publishing business because people need to have an anchor. They need to have a home base that drives all their decisions. For me it’s ABL.
RS: Yeah. And I think knowing who to look towards in terms of guidance, who to reach out to in terms of help, who best to use in terms of addendums to your own research and kind of self-directed path.
Rob, I appreciate you laying all this out for us and crystallizing and clarifying. You have Sungarden Investment Publishing on Seeking Alpha. You have ETFYourself.com. Many other places that we can read you and hear you. Anything else that you want to share with investors, feel free to add other places that people can reach you. But anything else that we missed here. Anything else that we missed today you think?
RI: All I would say and thank you so much, is always just a pleasure to be able to speak my mind. And hope that people connect with it in whatever way is meaningful for them. I think that 2024, it’s kind of like the tiebreaker, right?
We had 2022 which kind of stunk for stocks and bonds. We had 2023 which got better as the year went on even though the stock market was fairly concentrated. So looking into next year. Look, there are pockets of opportunity. It is the strangest environment to start a year 2024, that I’ve ever seen going back to the 1980s.
Strange because I think there’s incredible uncertainty, but uncertainty also breeds immense opportunity. Just don’t think it has to come from, I’m going to buy the (NYSEARCA:SPY) or the Qs or a couple of stocks and be done with it. It will come from a wide variety of places and having the flexibility and the accessibility to invest in a wide variety of themes, segments, et cetera. And that’s why I love the ETFs.
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