How Often Should You Rebalance an Investment Portfolio?
The stock market continues to climb and bonds remain in the limbo of low interest rates. There is a tendency for an investment portfolio to get out of balance in this environment. How often should you rebalance in investment portfolio? And, for that matter, why should you aim for a balanced portfolio instead of simply aiming for the best-performing investments?
Rationale for Balancing an Investment Portfolio
Investors balance their investment portfolios in order to balance the potential for return on their investments and the risk associated with those investments. The traditional approach is to invest primarily in stocks when you are young and starting out and to pivot towards more bonds, treasuries, and CDs as you approach retirement. An investor in their twenties may have 90% stocks and 10% bonds while someone in their forties might go with 70% and 30%. Traditionally, someone near or in retirement may have half or more of their portfolio in bonds. While the US stock market has historically returned as much as 10% a year on the average, there have been long periods when the market has slumped and remained down for years. The rationale for balancing an investment portfolio is not to get caught during a market crash and slump with no means of support while you wait for the market to recover.
Do You Really Need to Balance a Portfolio?
Warren Buffett has said something to the effect that people only balance their portfolio because they don’t know how to apply the concept of intrinsic value to pick the right stocks over the long term. That having been said, markets still slump and having a part of your investments in cash equivalents helps you avoid having to sell good stocks to living during retirement because the market crashed. Buffett’s suggestion in regard to those who do not have time or expertise to choose and follow the right stocks is to invest regularly in an ETF that tracks the S&P 500. This approach does indeed help avoid the problem of picking the wrong stocks but not the issue of being stuck 100% in stocks when the market crashes.
How Often Should You Rebalance an Investment Portfolio?
If you are going to follow the traditional recipe for allocating investments to stocks and bonds you will rebalance when it is time to change the mix as you get older and when the portfolio gets out of balance because either stocks or bonds have gotten ahead of the percent of the portfolio that you have chosen. Because the market and interest rates fluctuate normally, it is not a good idea to fuss over this issue every month. But, rather take a look and make changes on a yearly basis.
What Is the Best Method for Rebalancing an Investment Portfolio?
A good reason for holding off on rebalancing every time that the percentage varies a bit is that you would need sell your winners and buy new stocks or bonds to re-achieve balance. The best way to get back into balance is to adjust your purchases of stocks or bonds. If you are way ahead on your stock percentage as many investors are today it is time to invest in bonds, CDs, or treasuries until you have returned to the balance that you desire. One can simply use the dollar cost averaging route with stocks or interest bearing investments for this task.
What Is the Rule of 110?
If you are wondering just how much of your investment portfolio should be in stocks versus bonds, treasuries, or CDs, considering using the rule of 110. Take your age and subtract it from 110. If you are 30-years-old the rule of 110 will tell you to put 80% of your portfolio into stocks. If you are 60-years-old the rule of 110 will tell you to allocate 50% to stocks and 50% to interest-bearing investments. Investors have used this approach for decades. It is still in use because it keeps your portfolio from being top heavy with stocks at the end of a bull market when the risk of crash is high. And, it gets you back into stocks as a bear market is bottoming out and you can find bargain stocks for the next bull market.
How to Profit From the Growth of Solar Energy
The United States Department of Energy has just published their “blueprint” for a huge increase in the use of solar power in the USA from 4% to 45% of the total energy budget. This got us wondering how to profit from the growth of solar energy over the next years and decades. The work necessary to achieve this goal by 2050 would include doubling the rate of installation of solar energy facilities yearly for four years and then again by 2030. To achieve this goal would require an expansion of the electric grid as well. Along with their solar plans the administration wants to increase the number of offshore wind turbines from a handful to hundreds.
Investing in Cheap Solar Panels and More
As noted in a New York Times article about the Biden solar energy plans, solar panels have become cheaper in recent years.
The Energy Department said its calculations showed that solar panels had fallen so much in cost that they could produce 40 percent of the country’s electricity by 2035, enough to power all American homes and 45 percent by 2050.
Getting there will mean trillions of dollars in investments by homeowners, businesses and the government. The electric grid, built for hulking coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants, would have to be almost completely remade with the addition of batteries, transmission lines and other technologies that can soak up electricity when the sun is shining and to send it from one corner of the country to another.
This is the part that got us to thinking about how to profit from the growth of solar energy. China currently produces about eighty percent of the world’s solar panels. Due to tariff issues and concerns about an evolving trade war, Asian manufacturers are moving manufacturing operations into the USA. Five of the leaders are these:
LG Solar
Panasonic
Jinko Solar
Hanwa Q Cells
Sun Power
Sun Power is a US-based company listed on the NASDAQ (SPWR) and currently priced at $21.60 a share.
Investing in Lithium Batteries to Store Solar Energy
The drawback to relying on solar energy is that there is no power generation during the night. Thus a system that relies on solar needs to have a backup system. This can include wind, hydro, nuclear, and fossil fuels. It can also include batteries that store power during the day and release it at night. In our article about lithium mining investment issues we noted that China currently has the corner on the market for lithium mining and lithium battery production despite the fact that there is plenty of lithium to mine in the Western Hemisphere and specifically in the USA. And, the USA and Europe are both ramping up to produce more lithium batteries that will not be subject to supply chain issues with another pandemic or trade war with China. The biggest lithium battery manufacturers in the USA are these:
Panasonic Energy of North America
LG Chem Michigan Inc.
A123 Systems LLC
EnerSys
Samsung SDI Co. Ltd
EnerSys trades on the NYSE and the current stock price is $75.75.
Investing in companies that make lithium batteries instead of solar panels gives you the advantage of having a foot in solar and wind power as well as the huge surge in electric cars on the horizon.
Clean Energy Payment Plan
One of ways that the Biden administration will encourage electric utilities to allow home solar production into the electric grid is by providing tax credits via the Clean Energy Payment Plan. As noted in the Times article, electric utilities would rather build solar farms where they can control everything than allow homes and businesses to connect to their electric grids. The government hopes to make both things happen with incentives like the Clean Energy Payment Plan.
Investing in Raw Materials for an Expanded Electric Grid
Bringing solar up to the level that the government wants it to be over the next years will require employing and training tens of thousands of workers and will increase the need for aluminum, silicon, steel and glass. One could profit from this surge in demand in commodities by trading commodity futures or by investing in companies that mine, refine, and produce the necessary materials. US-based steel companies include the following:
Nucor, NYSE, NUE, $105.34
US Steel, NYSE, X, $23.57
ArcelorMittal SA, NYSE, MT, $31.93
As we noted in our article about the best investments in solar energy, there are many ways to invest in solar power. With the administration’s push to massively increase solar output in the USA, this subject just moved up on your list of investments to investigate in search of long term profits.
Investing in Commodities
A common argument for investing commodities is that doing so allows an investor to diversify a portfolio that consists solely of stocks and bonds. The most highly traded commodities are crude oil, coffee, natural gas, gold, wheat, cotton, corn, and sugar in that order. Commodity futures trading requires a special set of skills and is not what we are talking about when we look at whether investing in commodities is something that you should do to diversify your investment portfolio.
How to Invest in Commodities
There are five basic ways to invest in commodities. You can buy and hold commodities like precious metals as a hedge against inflation or buy and sell over the short term for profit. And, you can invest in ETFs that track commodities like gold which is a more flexible approach than buying and storing gold bullion. Or, you can invest in commodity producers. For example, when the price of gold goes up shares of gold mining stocks commonly go up faster. And, while the most-traded commodity is crude oil there are big oil stocks to invest in. And, like with commodities themselves there are ETFs that track commodity producers like the oil sector or mining stocks.
Investing in Commodities Via Futures
Professional traders trade commodity futures. It is a high reward and high risk trading arena and it is not investing. What some investors choose to do is put money into ETFs or ETNs that track an index which tracks commodity futures. One such index is the Bloomberg Commodity Index. The index tracks contracts on the following commodity futures.
| Energy | Grains | Industrial Metals | Precious Metals | Softs | Livestock |
| WTI Crude | Corn | COMEX Copper | Gold | Sugar | Live Cattle |
| Natural Gas | Soybeans | LME Aluminum | Silver | Coffee | Lean Hogs |
| Brent Crude | Soybean Meal | LME Zinc | Cotton | ||
| RBOB Gasoline | Chicago Wheat | LME Nickel | |||
| Low Sulphur Gas Oil | Soybean Oil | ||||
| ULS Diesel | Kansas HRW Wheat |
The index is set up so that no single commodity can be more than fifteen percent of the total and no set of derived commodities can be more than twenty-five percent. And, no sector can be more than a third of the index.
The DJP is an ETN that tracks the Bloomberg Commodity Index. Because it covers 23 different commodities it smooths out some of the volatility of individual commodity futures. Nevertheless, it has lots of ups and downs. And, over the years it has not been a good place to park money for the long term.
On the other hand, if one had invested in this ETN when the Covid-19 market crash bottomed out, they would have doubled their money by September of 2021. Thus, this investing route works better for short term, in and out, investments.
Why Invest in Commodities?
The point of investing is first of all to preserve your purchasing power and secondly to increase it. Many investors add gold bullion or a gold ETF to their portfolio to counter the effects of inflation. While it makes sense to buy and store gold over the years, that does not work with live cattle, sugar, coffee, or crude oil, all of which have “shelf lives.” “Hard assets” like gold, silver, platinum, or palladium offer inflation protection and tend to move in value contrary to bonds and stocks. Thus, these investments are promoted as ways to diversify portfolio risk. What is not mentioned in that argument is real estate fulfills much of the function and can provide you with a place to live or rent out for profit while also going up in value with inflation.
Chinese Real Estate and the Next Financial Crisis
The 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession started with the mortgage crisis in the USA. Subprime mortgages exploded over the first decade of the 21st century. When “subprime borrowers” were unable to pay and started to default the results in the financial system brought down banks and investment houses. The crisis spread across the globe. Today we are concerned about Chinese real estate and the next financial crisis.
Evergrand and the Chinese Debt Crisis
The Japan Times has a thoughtful piece about how China’s economy is threatened about the debt problems of Evergrande, a huge real estate developer that is in trouble.
Every once in a while a company grows so big and messy that governments fear what would happen to the broader economy if it were to fail. In China, Evergrande, a sprawling real estate developer, is that company. Evergrande has the distinction of being the world’s most debt-saddled property developer and has been on life support for months. A steady drumbeat of bad news in the recent weeks has accelerated what many experts warn is inevitable: failure.
Evergrande, like many Chinese companies, relied on heavy borrowing, the belief that the Chinese economy would steadily grow, and the belief that the government would bail them out if they got in trouble. As China’s debt has grown, the government is cracking down on this behavior. Today it is very possible that Evergrande will not get the sort of bailout that it needs. The ripple effects of this company going under could be substantial for the Chinese economy and for foreign investors who have profited from lending to Chinese companies.
Panic from investors and homebuyers could spill over into the property market and hit prices, affecting household wealth and confidence. It could also shake global financial markets and make it harder for other Chinese companies to continue to finance their businesses with foreign investment. Writing in The Financial Times last week, billionaire investor George Soros warned that an Evergrande default could cause China’s economy to crash.
Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong, said a failure could result in a credit crunch for the entire economy as financial institutions become more risk averse. An Evergrande failure, he added, was “not good news to the financial system or the overall economy.”
Debt and the Future of the Chinese Economy
Fortune writes that debt will be a bigger problem than demographics for the Chinese economy going forward. They note that as China ages there will be fewer workers to pay off more and more debt.
Total debt in China represents at least 280% of China’s GDP, according to government figures. If China’s future GDP growth requires the same level of credit growth as it has in the past, then China’s debt-to-GDP ratio must rise to somewhere between 400% and 500%: an unprecedented level of debt, especially for a developing country.
Adjusting for a declining working population makes the numbers even worse. As the working population declines by 0.5% to 0.6% a year, the amount of debt per worker rises by an additional 2% to 3% of GDP every year.
Their point is that China’s debt and growth model is no longer tenable and the time they have to fix the situation is shrinking as the number of workers declines.
Chinese Real Estate and the Next Financial Crisis
Every financial crisis has two aspects, the basic problem or problems at its core and the single issue that ignites the crisis. Rising inflation made the ever-increasing debt in the housing market in the USA unbearable. The collapse of a giant real estate developer in China could likewise be the last straw for an over-extended real estate market in China. Investors have lots of things to worry about including the persistence of Covid, extreme weather, the political dangers of investing in China, and now, an increasingly unstable Chinese real estate market who collapse could spread economic chaos far and wide.
Investment Risks to Watch Out For
Investing your money always comes with risks. But, leaving your cash in the bank with negative real interest rates means you are accepting a slow and steady decline to your purchasing power. As the stock market has continued its rally in the wake of the Financial Crisis, the chief concern of many investors (and pundits) has been market risk. Have stocks gone too high and too fast? When will be the next crash or correction? There are more investment risks to watch out for and those who are prepared are likely to avoid a lot of pain and suffering along the way.
Important Investment Risks to Watch Out For
Here are nine different risks for investors to be aware of. Each comes with its own level of risk and ways to avoid that particular risk.
- Market Risk
- Liquidity Risk
- Concentration Risk
- Credit Risk
- Reinvestment Risk
- Inflation Risk
- Horizon Risk
- Longevity Risk
- Foreign Investment Risk
Market Risk
Market risk is what most investors worry about. How is the economy going to affect their investments? How will the K-shaped Covid-19 Recession recovery affect their portfolio? Is the VIX telling us that the market is going to crash? The specific market risks include equity prices themselves, interest rates, and currency exchange rates. Interest rate changes have direct effects on bond prices and indirect effects on stock prices. Currency risk has to do with your foreign investments.
Liquidity Risk
One of the reasons that we warn investors about penny stocks is that when you need to sell them there may not be any buyers. In general, the larger the company the more shares they will issue and the more liquid will be their stock. Thus, your investment in a company like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon.com will less likely to trap you in a stock you cannot get out of than a penny stock that you bought on a tip from a friend and turns out to have been a pump and dump situation.
Concentration Risk
The vast majority of investors do not have the skill set of Warren Buffett who says that if you know which stocks to pick you don’t need to diversify your portfolio. For mere mortal investors, diversifying your investments spreads the risk across market sectors, investment types, and even world markets. In fact, when a recession hits and stock prices fall in the growth stock sector they will go up with value stocks in the consumer goods sector.
Credit Risk
This risk applies to corporate bonds or even government bonds. If a company (or country) is not doing well, has had to borrow money by issuing bonds, and now is stressed because interest rates have gone up and they will have to pay a higher rate when they issue bonds again. To make sure that you will get paid for your investment check the credit rating of the company. You should get higher interest rates for companies with low credit. It turns out that if you pool lots of such junk bonds from lots of companies the higher interest rates more than compensate for defaults making such investments more profitable than bonds with higher ratings.
Reinvestment Risk
When you routinely roll over CDs, reinvest corporate bonds, or use a dividend reinvestment plan you incur reinvestment risk when the original investment is not providing a high enough rate of return. Many investors put part of their money into vehicles like US Treasuries to protect the principal but then accept the reinvestment risk of slow loss of purchasing power of that investment vehicle. In general, younger investors accept more risk and older investors who will soon need the proceeds to live on continue with such investments.
Inflation Risk
Inflation is the loss of purchasing power due to the steady decrease in value of a currency. As a rule of thumb, investors in bonds expect to make enough on their interest to stay ahead of inflation by a few percent. That has been difficult in the last few years. Real estate is usually an investment that protects against inflation as property values tend to go up and rents can be increased to compensate for the steadily decreasing value of the currency.
Horizon Risk
Are you investing for retirement in 30 years, to put your children through college in 20 years, or to start a new business in 5 to 10 years? Which is your investment horizon? Each one has a horizon risk. The long term risk is that you will be in conservative investments too early and forego the profit potential of growth stock. The shorter term risk is that you will get caught in a market crash just when you expected to have the money you had accumulated with your investments. As a rule, investors roll over their risky assets into more-conservative ones as the time comes when they will need money for retirement, kids’ college education, or investment in the business they have dreamed of starting.
Longevity Risk
When they set up Social Security in the 1930s the average life expectancy was 60 years for men and 64 years for women. Since the age to start receiving benefits was 65, more than half of workers were expected no to live long enough to receive benefits. Today, life expectancy in the USA for a sixty-year-old is 21 more years for a man and 25 more years for a woman. In investing, your longevity risk is that you will outlive your savings, investments, and Social Security. Thus, investors approaching retirement need to balance the risk of a market downturn versus the risks of exiting growth stocks or stocks that pay healthy dividends just when they will start needing that money.
Foreign Investment Risk
Many times the opportunities of investing offshore outshine those of staying in US markets. And, then a new government comes into power, nationalizes all of the foreign companies and drives the country into a depression. Or, your foreign company does OK but the national currency takes a nosedive and takes your investment with it. Foreign investment risk is why many investors stay at home. But, if you want to diversify offshore the options include US-based funds that track foreign regional investments.
Crypto Bank or Pawnshop?
As noted in a recent article in The New York Times, banking regulators are concerned about companies that offer cryptocurrency loans and deposit accounts (in crypto) with potentially very high yields. Although the goal of the cryptocurrency world is to create a world in which one would never need any traditional currencies, that has not been the case until now. Companies like BlockFi offer deposit accounts, loans, and credit cards all based in cryptocurrency rather than dollars, euros, yen, or pounds. Because you need to deposit cryptocurrency with these folks in order to get loans or earn interest, the State of California raised the question with such company if they want to be a crypto bank or a pawnshop?
What Is a Bank?
In simple terms, a bank is an institution that takes deposits and pays interest, loans money and charges interest, invests to maintain obligatory financial reserves, offers debit and credit card services linked to a customer’s account and has FDIC backing for account categories and banks. Banks in the USA and elsewhere are regulated by the government because of their important role in the economy. And, all accounts are backed by a guarantee by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to $250,000 per bank, per ownership category.
Is a Crypto Bank Really a Bank?
As we noted, companies like BlockFi offer loans, interest-bearing accounts, and credit/debit cards. They do not offer anything like FDIC insurance on their accounts. However, savings accounts can provide returns approaching 90% and there are no background checks for loans as everything is based on how much of a crypto currency is on deposit. Because cryptocurrencies are so volatile there is the potential for huge gains and devastating losses. Some of this potential and risk is lessened by using cryptocurrencies called stable coins which are pegged to the dollar. The biggest difference from a bank is probably the fact that crypto institutions are routinely hacked and there is no protection against loss of all of your assets on deposit.
What Is a Pawnshop?
This question comes to mind because when BlockFi first applied for a banking license in California they were advised to get a license as a pawnbroker. This is because, like a pawn shop, a customer gives the crypto bank cryptocurrency on deposit and then can borrow money in dollars up to half the value of the account. A pawn shop or pawn broker is a business that loans money to people using personal property as collateral. Because BlockFi accepts cryptocurrency and not gold jewelry the folks in California who do pawn broker licenses said BlockFi did not qualify as a pawn broker.
Benefits and Risks of Crypto Banks
The benefits of using a crypto bank include not having to worry about credit checks when you want a loan, having your assets in a “currency” with the potential for exceptional growth, and not having to sell your cryptocurrency and pay taxes on your cryptocurrency profits when you need cash. The primary risk is that someone will hack the bank and take all of its assets. Then you will not have the FDIC protection afforded by a traditional bank account for a bank that goes belly up. Or, your crypto bank may be doing just fine but your cryptocurrency hits the skids and now you have a third of the value in dollars that you used to have just when you need cash.
What If the Fed Starts Issuing Cryptocurrency?
What to do about cryptocurrencies has been the subject of discussion at the highest levels including the US Federal Reserve. Fed Chairman Powell noted that if the USA had its own digital currency you would not need any of the current digital currencies. Because “you cannot fight the Fed” this could be the most compelling argument against banking with a crypto bank!
Defensive Investing Strategies
The stock market keeps going up despite the Delta variant wave of Covid-19 and the bull market that has been going on since the depths of the Financial Crisis continues. But, as investors keep driving the S&P 500, NASDAQ, and DOW to new records, many are employing defensive investing strategies. Defensive investing strategies are not so much meant to grow your portfolio as to prevent losing what you have gained over the years. Common defensive investing strategies include blue chip dividend stocks, short term US Treasuries, AAA Bonds, diversification across countries and market sectors, and keeping a portion of your assets as cash. Additional measures include trading options to hedge investment risk.
Investing in Dividend Stocks
Companies that have been paying dividends for decades and even more than a century are typically secure investments. When the economy sours, the stock market falls, and investors look for safety they typically buy companies that sell consumer staples, are in the health sector, or have amazingly strong balance sheets. These companies commonly pay dividends as well. If you have put part of your portfolio into a strong dividend stock before a market correction or crash you will typically see a bit of appreciation as other investors pile in later.
Investing with Treasuries and Corporate Bonds
US Treasuries are generally considered to be the most secure interest-bearing investment vehicles followed by AAA corporate bonds. A problem with this approach is that with increasing inflation and interest rates as low as they are today, you are saving with negative real interest rates. Your choices are to use long term treasuries or bonds to get higher interest rates or go very short term and accept extremely low rates. With this approach you will protect your dollars but not necessarily your purchasing power over time. The good part is that if the market does crash, you will have cash to pick up bargains as the market bottoms out.
Portfolio Diversification as a Defensive Investing Strategy
Many investors put their money into several US market sectors as well as abroad in order to benefit from where the growth is. Many also diversify in this manner so that investing mistakes in one sector are hopefully offset by growth in another. The best way to do this for most investors is to put your money into one or more ETFs that track the S&P 500, one or more of its sectors, and foreign markets. A problem for the average investor is that they have a “day job” that takes up the majority of their work day. This makes it difficult to adequately follow more than five or so investments. The ETF approach makes this less of a chore.
Defensive Options Trading Strategies
An approach used by professional investors, as well as options traders, to protect stock positions is to buy puts. A put is an option contract that gives the buyer the right to sell a stock at its contract price (strike price) at any time during the duration of the contract. The buyer is essentially purchasing insurance against the stock (or ETF) being taken down in a correction or crash. If the bottom does fall out of the stock price, the put buyer can execute the contract and sell the stock at the strike price even though it may have fallen ten or twenty percent. Alternatively, they can sell the contract to exit and get cash.
Three Versions of Defensive Puts
The basic defensive put strategy is to buy one more put contracts on the stock that you want to protect. Each contract is for 100 shares. Depending on how much of a loss you are willing to accept before having the put kick in, you can pay quite a bit for the contract or not very much. Assuming that you hold a lot of the stock and that you set your strike price rather high, this can get to be expensive if you continually roll over the contracts to continue the protection. There are two approaches that make this less expensive.
Synthetic Short Stock
If you are certain that your stock is going to fall in price, you can use a synthetic short stock approach. In this case, you buy a put but also sell a call. While the put you sold gives you the right to purchase the stock, the call contract gives the buyer the right to buy the stock from you at the strike price of the contract. You set this up with the same strike price for the puts and calls and the same expiration date. The premium that you receive for selling the call contract will reduce your cost for the trade and may even leave you with a small credit. If the price goes down you can treat this strategy like a protective put and if it goes up the buyer will execute the contract and you will sell the stock for the strike price. Although this approach is cheaper than a simple put, there are a couple of issues.
Protective Collar
This approach is the same as the synthetic short stock route but it has two advantages. First, it is cheaper and second, it protects you from selling your stock due to normal market fluctuation. A protective collar sets the put and call strike prices at different levels. The put is much lower than the current stock price and the call is much higher. Since the put and call are out-of-the-money, they are cheap. Thus you can use this approach over the long term if you choose to. And, because you set the strike prices far enough apart, you will not end up selling the stock just because the market fluctuates a little and then see the market stabilize.
Hedging Your Investments with Index Futures
Investing in the stock market can provide an excellent return on investment over the years. Simply by purchasing shares of the SPY ETF one can match the performance of the S&P 500. However, the stock market, not to mention individual stock prices, can be volatile. Bull markets tend to be followed by bear markets before bull markets re-emerge. One of the ways that you can protect yourself against short term loss is by hedging your investments with index futures.
What Is a Futures Contract?
A futures contract is an agreement entered into via a futures exchange in which the buyer takes on the obligation to purchase a security or commodity asset at an agreed upon price at a future date. The seller accepts the obligation to sell that security on the agreed upon date no matter what the market price is. If a person does not exit the contract before expiration they are obliged to buy or sell as specified in the contract. However, most futures traders and investors hedging their investments with futures exit by selling if they had purchased and buying if they had sold. Because the price of the futures contract will generally have gone up or down, the person will have made or lost money. The point of hedging your investments against loss with index futures is to make money by selling index futures and cover the losses in your portfolio.
How Do You Hedge a Stock Portfolio With Futures?
What stock investors are worried about is that the market will correct or crash and that their stocks will lose value. Index futures are commonly used to hedge against loss in a market downturn. This is because an index like the S&P 500 moves up and down with the economy and generally runs parallel to a basket of large cap stocks. By selling index futures such as for the S&P 500 the investor protects against a downturn as the futures contract will increase in value if the index falls. Rather than waiting for the contract expire the investor will exit the contract by buying and use the profit to offset portfolio losses.
What Are Index Futures?
Index futures are cash settled futures contracts on indexes like the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, or NASDAQ. Most of these contracts settle quarterly in March, June, September, and December. The futures market trades nearly 24 hours a day with a brief break for settlements six days a week. The S&P 500 futures contract is the most heavily traded index future. The SP contract is the base futures contract for the S&P 500. Multiply the S&P 500 by $250 to get its price. As of this writing, the S&P 500 is 4441.37 which makes the SP contract worth $1,110,342.50. The E-mini future contract is a fifth of the SP contract making it worth $222,068.50. If you choose to trade index futures to hedge your stock portfolio you will need to have money in your brokerage account to cover the necessary margin. In general, the amount needed for margin for futures trading is less that needed for day trading but it needs to be enough to cover your obligations as the market progresses. The CME requires at least $6,300 in maintenance margin for overnight trading of futures and most experts suggest the traders only risk one or two percent of account equity on any given trade.
Is It Better to Hedge Risk with Options or Futures?
Depending on the strategy that you use, both options and futures can add risk to your investment life instead of taking it away. If you are interested in hedging your investments with index futures or options you need to be clear about your strategy, understand the risks, and pay constant attention. If you are unable or unwilling to do this, both approaches can lead to trouble. Because when you buy a call or put option you have the choice of exercising the contract or not, this is commonly a safer route that futures where you are locked into the contract unless you exit at a loss.
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Saving With Negative Real Interest Rates
As historically low interest rates persist and inflation accelerates, saving with negative real interest rates becomes increasingly futile. In this article we take a look at real interest rates and how to save and invest in the current era. We have written about how negative interest rates can affect your investments. For now rates are not likely to go negative but also the Fed appears to be in no great hurry to raise rates despite inflationary pressures. Thus, many are confronted with the problem of saving with negative real interest rates for the foreseeable future.
What Are Real Interest Rates?
The return as measured in purchasing power that an investor receives for an interest rate investment (bank savings, US Treasuries, bonds) is the real interest rate. Simplistically, this is the rate of a savings account, CD, Treasury, or bond minus the rate of inflation. In an article about how now is a terrible time for savers, The New York Times notes that savers have two choices. One is to keep their money safe with interest rate investments like CDs and Treasuries and accept that they will be losing purchasing power on those investments. And, two is to continue to invest in stocks with the potential for a greater return on investment along with the risk of the stock market correcting or crashing with substantially greater losses.
What Is Your Rate of Inflation?
The rate of inflation that you experience will depend on what you need to buy. If you are in the market for a new home, prices are up 15% year on year since 2020 and if you need to buy lumber for an addition to your home, expect to pay 400% more than last year for the same materials. Used cars are up as are new cars as chip shortages have cut back on new car production. But, if you own your home and expect to drive your car for years, you are better off. Costs of health care, insurance, and medicines are rising at a rate faster than the reported 2+ percent of inflation. If you are employed in a growing business sector you can expect to see your wages go up to compensate for inflation. If you are retired, you can expect to need to count your pennies more and more over the years.
What Can You Do About Negative Real Interest Rates?
According to Investopedia inflation eats away at your retirement. Despite yearly inflation, the government does not always increase Social Security payments every year and when they do they use an index that is more appropriate for younger people and not old folks for whom things like health care are major parts of their budget. Standard advice for those going into retirement has always been to rotate more and more of your portfolio into interest bearing vehicle such as bonds, CDs, and Treasuries. The rationale has always been that retirees cannot afford the risks associated with all of their wealth being tied up in stocks. However, today it would appear that retirees cannot afford to see their wealth being eaten up by the corrosive effects of negative real interest rates.
Stable dividend stocks, utilities especially, have traditionally been part of retiree portfolios. Today, the safest way to invest in the stock market is probably to use dollar cost averaging and invest in an ETF that tracks the S&P 500. The SPY which tracks the S&P 500 passes through the dividends that are paid out by the stocks it invests in. The current rate is 1.26% per year. The point is to retain a steady cash flow along with appreciation in value to your portfolio in an attempt to stay ahead of inflation and avoid just saving with negative real interest rates.
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Lithium Mining Investment Issues
As the world moves steadily towards electric vehicles and efficient means of storing energy with batteries, lithium batteries have become a major player. Lithium batteries are rechargeable repeatedly, light weight, and can store large amounts of electric energy. They are used in car batteries and that use is expected to go up to ten times the current use by 2030 while GM, Volkswagen, Tesla, and others bring more and more electric vehicles into service. While the USA has abundant sources of lithium only one lithium mine exists in the USA producing about 2% of current production. Lithium mining investment issues will become increasingly important as the USA moves to both mine more lithium and manufacture lithium batteries domestically for domestic use.
Domestic Lithium Battery Supply Chain
Currently, two-thirds of the world’s lithium batteries are made in China. As the USA found out in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, disruption of supply chains for foreign-made products can lead to manufacturing halts, loss of business, and other painful results. As the USA and China increasingly compete to dominate the global economy, the USA is moving to develop supply chains for products like lithium batteries that will not be at risk due to trade disputes or power play supply cutoffs. In short, mining lithium and producing lithium batteries in the USA has become a national security issue closely tied to the health of the American economy.
Problems with Mining Lithium in the USA
The New York Times wrote about the lithium gold rush to power electric vehicles. While lithium batteries are part of the answer for a greener future, lithium is a mixed blessing when it comes to mining it and the other minerals, like cobalt, needed to make lithium batteries. One of the projects they write about is a proposed lithium mine project in Nevada called Lithium Americas that has drawn criticism.
But the project, known as Lithium Americas, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers and environmental groups because it is expected to use billions of gallons of precious ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.
It turns out that while the USA has lots of lithium reserves, traditional mining of these reserves can have very “non-green” side effects when the point of using lithium batteries for cars and energy storage is to create a “greener” world. From an investor’s viewpoint, national security concerns will probably overshadow many of the environmental concerns for many projects. However, not all sources of lithium and not all ways of extracting lithium are as problematic as the Lithium Americas project.
Extracting Lithium from Brine
Lithium is found in brine deposits and this is where much of the lithium “mined” in South America comes from. A new process that holds promise for extracting lithium more efficiently and economically may also hold promise for investors. Lilac Solutions has developed ion exchange beads that can be used to more-efficiently extract lithium from salt brines without the many polluting issues related to traditional lithium mining.
A site where investors plan to try this approach is the Salton Sea in Southern California. The sea sits atop an extinct volcano and the plan is to build geothermal power plants that by them themselves will generate income and pay for the extraction process of taking lithium from the hot water from 4,000 feet below the surface as is passes through the power plant. Because salt brines contain large amounts of lithium, this approach may be a more commercially and environmentally feasible way to extract large amounts of lithium than traditional mining.
While Lilac Solutions is a privately owned company they don’t do the mining. They produce the means for ion exchange lithium extraction from brine. We suggest that while the stampede begins to mine lithium and build battery production facilities in the USA that investors consider lithium mining investment issues such as those associated with traditional mining when choosing where to invest their money for a greater profit with fewer problems.
Lithium Mining Investment Issues – Slideshare Version