Portfolio Caught in a Riptide!
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What do you do when your portfolio is caught in a riptide? When I was a kid, our family, we used to load up the van. My dad had a platform in the back of our van so we could put luggage underneath and some on the roof. And we would have a little sleep on the top. And our entire family, sometimes the eight of us, because my grandmother and aunt would come too, we’d make the trek from Albany, New York down to Florida.
Sometimes I drive straight through but other times it’s kind of neat and stop along the way. And we were always fans, always fans, my brothers and I, of stopping in Myrtle Beach, some of the beaches along the East Coast because of big waves. And we loved going out there and riding the waves. That was awesome because my grandfather lived on the Gulf Coast before. Not really waves unless it was a hurricane. But anyway, neither of you know it yet. I remember being out there one time when I was younger.
and getting this feeling like I can’t get back in and getting sucked out by the ocean and for whatever reason it wasn’t that strong because I was younger because it was really bad.
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Getting caught in Riptide and it happens all the time people dive it every single year strong current Comes back out pulls the water out towards the ocean. What happens is people try to fight The Riptide try to swim against the Riptide they get tired and they drown now What you have to do is avoid the Riptide. So how the hell you avoid the Riptide? You don’t try to swim against it
kind of swim out of it. And I think it’s the best way of trying to deal with the situation at hand. I’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve dealt with countless calamities and panics in the market. What makes this one a little bit different than the others is, well, the other ones were
predictable in many respects. We called a lot of these things and we can see a way out. can see a way. I know that can’t see a way out here but never ever in you know our history have I ever seen this type of a situation where you’ve got a market that for all intents and purposes was was taken down intentionally. You put forward
proposals where it’s going to be damaging to the economy. I would never ever have thought that a president would ever do something like this. With that being said, again, there’s a difference between men and women. I talk about that here on the program. Women, as we’d say, do with my wife. Oftentimes, something will be wrong with her and
So she’s on a percent about something and she doesn’t want me to solve the problem. She kind of wants me to commiserate with her, kind of feel her pain type of a situation. Men like to be able to figure things out. They like to be able to solve problems. I like to be able to give you something definite, a fix. You know, when our kids get hurt, whatever it may be, you automatically wish that pain
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Upon yourself you want to be able to solve the problem. That’s what we do. So I spent most of my weekend pretty angry Pretty I never go to the gym on Sunday. It’s my day off I went to the gym on Sunday because I had I had to take out aggression because I was upset and that Frustrated about what’s taking place, you know trying to figure out trying to get my arms around how to go about fixing this
There’s nothing, absolutely nothing that we can do. This morning, we watched the markets futures tank overnight, open up down. Some rumor comes out that Trump is considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. I’ve never ever seen the S &P 500 rally 7 % in 15 minutes.
and it down moved 2,300 points in the same period of time. This is not investing, this is more or less a video game. And a dangerous one at that, much like a riptide. You cannot fight it. Give you a bit of a movie sub-reference. When I was a kid, 1980s film, movie War Games.
where it’s AI computer takes over a government gaming computer and starts playing global thermonuclear war and actually that gets control of the weapons and they’re to start a war with Russia because of the computers and eventually the computer, the AI program, out the only way to win is not to play and that’s the way it is now. It’s basically you
against the machines right now when it comes to try and trade so don’t do that.
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in the past and quite frankly it’s a matter of trying to figure out what this administration is going to do next. I will get that to another podcast and another piece. What we’re advising, what we’re advising people to do right now, again, we’re raising cash in the sense that we’re telling our clients, hey listen, okay,
I don’t know if this is the, because I don’t. I don’t. I am as uncertain as uncertain can be. But if your time frame is, like I said, five, 10, 15, 20 years down the road, yeah, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to be fine and we’ll get into that as well. However, okay, I’ve talked about this, written pieces about this, the importance of conducting a portfolio fight.
What’s a portfolio fire drill? What if something bad happens? Okay, what if something bad happens? If you need to have an accident fire drill, remember like we were back in school, remember like, again I remember because it was bloody cold in upstate New York and they would conduct stupid fire drills in the middle of the winter and you go out cold. Sometimes you’d be happy about the fire drill because you’d be in the middle of a test or something like that and you might get out of it. But anyway, neither here nor there, okay? Get a conductor portfolio fire drill.
And you better, you you need to make sure, you need to be prepared, okay, that you’re able to deal with another 20 % to the downside, because that’s in the cards. And I don’t lie to you, that’s in the cards. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s nonsensical, but it is. It’s in the cards. So that’s something that, again,
you need to take into consideration. Are advising people to sell high quality companies? talked about reasons to sell. If you take a look at a company and its management’s gone bad, the business is bad, a lot of things going wrong for that company.
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deteriorating business, poor capital allocation, what it’s doing, making poor decisions, a myriad of different things. The other one of the things for also selling positions is you need cash for other commitments in life. And again, that’s something to take into consideration at this point in time. Again, it’s something we’re reminding people of.
want to take a look overall. As bad as the situation is, I’m not sure recording this by any stretch of the imagination.
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It will work its way out, it always does. It always does. Eventually, logic will prevail when it comes to this. But frankly, it’s just how long that’s gonna take. Another one of my, some reference, a movie I some reference from time to time from one of, know, well I some reference this guy. Jeff Goldblum played Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park.
And there was a sea in Jurassic Park. They’re hiding in the jungle. Somewhere they’re hiding in Jurassic Park and all of sudden they see baby dinosaurs. How is that possible? How is that possible? I thought Dr. Hammond said they engineered all the dinosaurs to be female. Dr. Eamon Hopkins says one thing about nature. Nature will always find a way. Business will always find a way.
always has. It will find a way through and this will find a way through. I wish I had more information but again everything is on a hair trigger right now. It’s on a hair trigger. A lot of damage has been done. That could change in a tweet.
Unfortunately, that’s not how I like markets to behave. makes our lives very, difficult here at Markowski Investments. It really does. It makes our lives very, difficult. This is not something that Miami’s threats the imagination that we have on.
But like every other situation we’ve dealt with, we’re going to deal with it. We’re going to deal with it the best way we can. Feel free, feel free to reach out to us, contact us at any point in time, any hour of the day. We will answer the phone. We will be here for you like we always have. God bless. White Strong on WallStreet.com
