Tremendous

An angel investor's take on life and business

  • Let’s Make Our Own Index Fund!

    The Problem

    Bonds are a big part of many investors’ portfolios. But yields today are close to nonexistent.

    Since 2009, rates have been at or below the rate of inflation. Two bond funds I own pay 1.88% and 1.45% respectively.

    Inflation is currently running at about 4.8%. This means I’m paying about 2.9-3.4% per year after inflation for the privilege of owning these funds.

    Not fun, right?

    An Unlikely Solution

    So I’ve been exploring building a portfolio of high dividend stocks to replace the bonds and provide income. The stocks I’m interested in have paid high dividends for decades straight.

    They represent the highest payors amongst the Dividend Aristocrats. Call them the Dividend Royals.

    What if I had my own index fund of these companies? Each stock could be automatically weighted in the portfolio based on its market cap.

    So, since Exxon Mobil has a much larger market cap than Federal Realty Investment Trust, for example, it would be a proportionately larger piece of the index fund.

    A sophisticated solution could even automatically rebalance the fund on a regular schedule. This would keep the stocks in correct proportion to each other.

    But who can provide such a service?

    The Hunt

    Not many companies, it turns out. Here are the biggest providers of “direct indexing”, or DIY index funds, per Bloomberg:

    Vanguard also has such an offering via its recent acquisition of Just Invest.

    I’ve requested demos from Vanguard, Parametric (part of Morgan Stanley), and Aperio (part of BlackRock). If I see anything good, I’ll report back!

    There’s also an interesting offering from Interactive Brokers called BasketTrader. While I didn’t have the time to dig deep into it today, it looks like it may provide a solid tool for direct indexing.

    Do you know a good direct indexing provider? Please leave a comment at the bottom.

    There will be no blog on Monday or Tuesday. An old friend is coming to visit!

    See you on Wednesday. Have a great weekend everyone!

    More on markets:

    How Did High Dividend Stocks Perform In the Last Crash?

    Should Anyone Own Bonds?

    Starting a Financial Plan from 0

    Photo: “Thunderbird Supercomputer” by SandiaLabs is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • AMC Fails to Deliver Jump 2700%

    Fails to deliver in shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. jumped over 2700% in the latest data from the SEC.

    After falling to a low level at the end of September, fails to deliver exploded in October. As of October 14th, the last day in the latest data set, they stood at nearly 80,000.

    This amount of fails to deliver is 789 times Amazon’s, 849 times Microsoft’s, and significantly larger even than Apple’s. Why would the largest stocks in the market have far fewer shares failing to deliver than AMC, with a market cap of just $20 billion?

    First, let’s recap what a fail to deliver is. A share in a company fails to deliver when a trade is made but never completed. The shares are never actually delivered to the buyer.

    This can happen for benign reasons. But AMC has persistent, huge fails to deliver.

    When that happens, it’s often a sign of illegal naked short selling. This involves selling short shares you never borrowed.

    The shares can’t be delivered because they never existed in the first place. Meanwhile, the seller has a powerful tool to the push the price down.

    If you don’t even have to bother borrowing shares, you can keep selling forever.

    What you tend to see in AMC stock is the market makers whittling down the fails to deliver for a little while, only to see them quickly pop back up to enormous levels. Following the stock for some time now, I’ve seen this pattern over and over.

    We’ve noticed, but when will the SEC?

    More on markets:

    Citadel Demands Dismissal of Lawsuit, Citing SEC Report

    Starting a Financial Plan from 0

    Citadel Builds Huge Position in AMC Call Options

    Raw SEC data (the fails to deliver are the number right before the company name):

    20210930|00165C104|AMC|2815|AMC ENTMT HLDGS INC CL A COM S|35.54

    20211014|00165C104|AMC|78931|AMC ENTMT HLDGS INC CL A COM S|37.91

    20211013|023135106|AMZN|100|AMAZON COM INC;COM USD0.01|3247.33

    20211014|037833100|AAPL|58498|APPLE INC;COM NPV|140.91

    20211014|594918104|MSFT|93|MICROSOFT CORP;COM USD0.000012|296.31

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Citadel Demands Dismissal of Lawsuit, Citing SEC Report

    Citadel Securities LLC has demanded the dismissal of a pending lawsuit in federal court in South Florida.

    The grounds: the recent SEC report on January’s meme stock rally did not find collusion between its hedge fund arm, Citadel LLC, and Robinhood Markets, Inc.

    The lawsuit alleges that Citadel pressured Robinhood to stop buy orders in meme stocks like GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Citadel had a substantial investment in Melvin Capital Management LP, which was losing billions shorting meme stocks.

    Citadel’s demand for dismissal is absurd because the SEC report barely mentions the allegations in the Florida lawsuit. They are glossed over in a single paragraph, relying solely on testimony from the people involved (see footnote 92 above).

    The SEC has decided to take Vlad Tenev (CEO of Robinhood), Gabriel Plotkin (CIO of Melvin), and Ken Griffin (CEO of Citadel) at their word. But any or all of those statements may be false.

    What’s more, this lawsuit alleges that top executives of Robinhood and Citadel were in contact right before trades were limited.

    That contact should be explored in detail. The court needs to review emails, internal chat messages, and phone records.

    To take a whitewash of an SEC report and then use it to dismiss a lawsuit is ridiculous.

    Let’s hope the court sees through it.

    More on markets:

    Citadel Builds Huge Position in AMC Call Options

    Starting a Financial Plan from 0

    AMC May Issue Its Own Cryptocurrency, Per CEO

    Photo: “Ken Griffin” by DanGPhotos1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • A Vaccine for Breast Cancer?

    Breast cancer killed 685,000 women worldwide last year. But the Cleveland Clinic has a new drug that could change that:

    Cleveland Clinic researchers have opened a novel study for a vaccine aimed at eventually preventing triple-negative breast cancer, the most aggressive and lethal form of the disease.

    Triple negative breast cancer only accounts for 12-15% of cases, but it’s unusually deadly.

    Unlike most vaccines, the breast cancer vaccine could even help people who already have cancer:

    “We are hopeful that this research will lead to more advanced trials to determine the effectiveness of the vaccine against this highly aggressive type of breast cancer,” said G. Thomas Budd, M.D., of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute and principal investigator of the study. “Long term, we are hoping that this can be a true preventive vaccine that would be administered to healthy women to prevent them from developing triple-negative breast cancer, the form of breast cancer for which we have the least effective treatments.”

    Dr. Vincent Tuohy, inventor of the breast cancer vaccine, thinks vaccines may also work against ovarian and endometrial cancers:

    “If successful, these vaccines have the potential to transform the way we control adult-onset cancers and enhance life expectancy in a manner similar to the impact that the childhood vaccination program has had.”

    The idea of a vaccine for cancer isn’t as crazy as it may sound. BioNTech, producer of the first COVID vaccine approved in the United States, was working on cancer vaccines when the pandemic hit.

    BioNTech currently has a colorectal cancer vaccine in Phase 2 clinical trials. That drug is even customized to each person’s body for maximum effectiveness.

    We may be headed toward a world where if you have cancer, a few injections could stop the tumors in their tracks. And if you don’t have cancer, a preventive vaccine could ensure you never develop it.

    The breast cancer vaccine’s Phase 1 trials should wrap up in September of 2022. I can’t wait for the results!

    More on tech:

    Male Contraception With an Ultrasound Device?

    How Tech Could Stop Wildfires

    What if Everyone on Earth Had Super Fast Internet for $1?

    Photo: “Breast Cancer Cells” by National Institutes of Health (NIH) is marked with CC PDM 1.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Jack Ciattarelli’s $10 Billion Budget Cut

    New Jersey has an election tomorrow, pitting Democratic Governor Phil Murphy against Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli.

    While researching who to vote for, I came across a startling piece of information. From NJ.com:

    Ciattarelli has vowed to cut $10 billion in spending from the budget. But he has not outlined what programs he’d slash.

    That got me wondering: how big is the state budget? Would cutting $10 billion be a little, or a lot?

    It turns out the total state budget is $46.4 billion. A $10 billion cut would mean slashing 22% of the state budget.

    That sounds drastic. If Ciattarelli had clearly outlined wasteful spending we should eliminate, I’d feel a little better about his argument.

    But the total lack of clarity on what state services will get the axe concerns me.

    Would this mean no more buses, closing state parks, or the end of free community college? We have no way to know because the candidate hasn’t told us.

    The question is, do we want to find out?

    More on New Jersey:

    Murphy’s Innovation Agenda

    The Best Mexican Food Is In…New Jersey?

    A Hidden Castle…In New Jersey?

    Photo: “File:Jack Ciattarelli.jpg” by NJTVNews is licensed under CC BY 3.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Murphy’s Innovation Agenda

    If you’re a fellow New Jerseyan, you know a big election is coming up. We have the constant barrage of commercials and junk mail to prove it.

    Doing some research on the races today, I came across an interesting initiative Governor Phil Murphy recently passed. It’s called the NJ Innovation Evergreen Fund.

    This fund provides tens of millions of dollars to venture firms to invest in New Jersey-based companies. I’d love to see our state dominate this field, especially since we’re the original home of the transistor!

    I invest in tech startups and I can tell you this much: every one of them is hiring. They’re a great source of high quality jobs.

    Murphy also passed free community college and a $1 billion school funding increase. This means our population will have better skills.

    The transformative inventions and great companies of tomorrow will be created by those with the best skills. And I want New Jersey to be a big part of that.

    One change I’d suggest to the fund would be to have it directly invest in companies. Its current structure is complicated and hard to understand.

    If the fund simply hired people knowledgeable about tech and venture capital and came in as a co-investor on great New Jersey-based companies, it could help them scale much faster.

    And if the fund did well, the state could make a huge profit.

    I’m excited to see this novel approach by the Murphy administration. Let’s make the Menlo Park that matters most Menlo Park, NJ!

    More on tech:

    Why I Just Invested in Kippo, Where Gamers Find Love

    What if Everyone on Earth Had Super Fast Internet for $1?

    Why I Just Invested in Capbase, The Startup in a Box

    Photo: “Governor Murphy, Lieutenant Governor Oliver, Senate President Sweeney and Speaker Coughlin hold a press conference on budget agreement in Trenton on June 30, 2019.Edwin J. Torres/NJ Governor’s Office.” by GovPhilMurphy is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Over 57,000 Sign Petition to Ban Payment for Order Flow

    At last count, 57,610 people have signed a petition at Change.org to ban payment for order flow. This practice involves market makers paying brokers for the chance to complete trades.

    The market makers claim they complete the trade at slightly better than public market prices while still making a small profit.

    At least one study indicates that payment for order flow actually does save customers money, especially considering that it removes the need for commissions. However, both Citadel Securities LLC and Robinhood Markets, Inc. have been fined for providing worse prices than public exchanges.

    I favor not a ban, but more careful regulation of payment for order flow. I think the SEC should require brokers like Robinhood and market makers like Citadel to release data on a regular basis proving that they’re getting customers better prices than public exchanges.

    Both companies are world class experts in data aggregation and analysis. They’re more than up to the task.

    This type of regulation would allow retail traders to continue to trade commission free while also making sure they’re protected.

    Meanwhile, if an investor doesn’t want their order sold to a market maker, Interactive Brokers offers such an account. But sure enough, it’s not free.

    Many companies also sell investors their stock directly, no broker needed. Such a plan could be a great service for companies like AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. and GameStop Corp. to pursue.

    So, will you be the signing petition? Let me know in the comments at the very bottom of the page.

    More on markets:

    Citadel Builds Huge Position in AMC Call Options

    How Elrond Could Take Over Payments Worldwide

    AMC May Issue Its Own Cryptocurrency, Per CEO

    Photo: “Occupy Wall Street” by DoctorTongs is licensed under CC BY 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Citadel Builds Huge Position in AMC Call Options

    Hedge fund Citadel LLC has amassed the largest position in AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. of any hedge fund.

    For investors in AMC, Citadel and its CEO, Ken Griffin, have often served as archvillains.

    And not without reason. A pending lawsuit in Florida alleges that Citadel Securities LLC may have pressured Robinhood Markets, Inc. into limiting trades in AMC, GameStop Corp., and other meme stocks.

    This sent their prices down and may have benefited Citadel LLC’s portfolio.

    Now, Griffin and Citadel seem to have decided that if you can’t beat them, join them:

    When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Citadel Investment Group, managed by Ken Griffin, holds the most valuable position in AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc (NYSE:AMC). Citadel Investment Group has a $338.1 million call position in the stock, comprising 0.1% of its 13F portfolio.

    With AMC’s stock up more than 17-fold for the year, Griffin seems to have realized that fighting hordes of retail traders is a losing battle.

    He’s in good company. Jim Simons, legendary founder of Renaissance Technologies LLC, has been loading up on AMC shares since at least August.

    Other top funds, including D.E. Shaw (former employer of Jeff Bezos), have also thrown their hats in the ring.

    One of the most common sayings in markets is “The trend is your friend.” Griffin will find few friends in the meme stock community, but the trend may be on his side.

    More on markets:

    Jim Simons Buys AMC, Bets on Retail Trend

    How Did High Dividend Stocks Perform In the Last Crash?

    AMC May Issue Its Own Cryptocurrency, Per CEO

    Photo: “Ken Griffin” by DanGPhotos1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Polygon: Crypto’s Killer App?

    Everyone loves Ethereum, right? It’s widely used and has a ton of code already out there for developers to slot into their projects.

    But there’s one problem.

    Ethereum can only process about 15 transactions per second. And the huge amount of computing power needed has gotten expensive. Some transactions can cost over $100 each.

    What if there were a way to take the developer-friendly world of Ethereum and make it much, much faster?

    That’s where Polygon comes in. Polygon can run at up to 65,000 transactions per second, far faster than even Visa’s huge network.

    But developers can still use Ethereum-compatible blockchains and take advantage of the huge amount of code already available on Ethereum.

    Similar to an API company like Plaid, the success of a smart contract platform like Polygon is all about developer adoption. The more widely it’s used, the more valuable it becomes.

    Given that developers can write code on a platform they’re used to, I think Polygon will have a big advantage over most. It shows in the numbers: daily active users have gone from 750 at the beginning of the year to 192,000 in August.

    Polygon is being used for a lot more than price speculation. The most popular project is QuickSwap, which lets you trade 100 cryptocurrency pairs quickly and easily.

    My favorite project is Polymarket, where you can bet on real world events like elections or court cases. This could be useful for predicting the weather, a major need of agriculture businesses.

    So will I be buying Polygon?

    Despite its impressive technology, in a high risk investment like this, I’m looking for the possibility of a 100x return. I’d look for the same in a tech startup.

    At a fully diluted market cap of $18 billion, Polygon may have already become so successful that it doesn’t make an ideal investment for me.

    But I’ll be watching this awesome team to see what they come up with next!

    More on tech:

    How Elrond Could Take Over Payments Worldwide

    How Tech Could Stop Wildfires

    How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

    Photo: “File:Raspberry Pi Bitcoin Mining (14673305874).jpg” by Gareth Halfacree from Bradford, UK is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • How Did High Dividend Stocks Perform In the Last Crash?

    The Problem

    I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to lose patience with bonds. The yields are rock bottom. Inflation is high.

    And the interest rate outlook is pointing in one direction: up. This would mean substantial losses for bonds.

    So I’ve been looking into high dividend stocks as an alternative. And not just any high dividend companies: the Dividend Aristocrats.

    The Dividend Aristocrats

    Ultra high dividends are nice, but if the company quickly depletes its cash and has to slash them, it doesn’t do us much good. That’s why Dividend Aristocrats are so attractive.

    To get on the list, a company has to raise dividends for 25 years. Straight.

    As of 2021, there are 65 Dividend Aristocrats.

    The Experiment

    Today, I wanted to see how some of the highest yielding Dividend Aristocrats performed in the last stock market crash. It lasted from February 19 to March 23, 2020.

    The S&P 500 index lost 33.9% of its value in a matter of weeks. Not gonna lie, it was interesting. 🙂

    I focused on companies currently yielding above 3%. I figured there wasn’t much point in replacing bonds with stocks that yield only slightly more.

    Only 17 stocks made it into this illustrious group. Call them the Dividend Royals.

    The Results

    So how did the Dividend Royals do in the last crash?

    Not terribly well. On average, they dropped 36%. That’s slightly worse than the S&P 500’s 33.9%.

    Why did the Dividend Royals do worse? The fact that a small number of energy and real estate companies in this group suffered huge losses is one major factor.

    Bonds, boring and frustrating as they are, did much better. The long-term Treasury fund actually gained 11.7%. The bond market index fund I own lost just 1.2%.

    But today, they yield just 1.91% and 1.41% respectively.

    Conclusion

    Despite being solid, mature companies, high dividend stocks fell further than the market in the most recent crash. However, these creme de la creme of the Dividend Aristocrats all kept paying their fat dividends.

    If you can stomach the capital loss, they may be a better bet.

    More on markets:

    Starting a Financial Plan from 0

    FOMO: Investors’ Worst Enemy

    Where Can We Hide in a Financial Crisis?

    Note: Price data comes from Yahoo! Finance

    Photo: “Stock Market Crisis Over” by Wagner T. Cassimiro ‘Aranha’ is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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