Armchair Financial Canada

Warren Buffet, the legendary Oracle of Omaha, is the chairman and largest shareholder of  Berkshire Hathaway . He is the second wealthiest person in the United States, and the fourth wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of over $70 billion. Buffet has made his fortune through decades of research and acquisition of companies that he considers to be well-priced given the quality of their management and the fundamentals of their underlying finances (value investing). Buffet is a classic long-term investor – his preferred holding period for an investment is ‘forever’. That being said, Buffet himself realizes and understands that investing is a ‘zero-sum’ game. In order for their to be winners, there have to be losers.  Not all investors and certainly not all financial advisors can sustain above-average returns relative to the markets.  It’s a mathematical impossibility! So what does Warren recommend for the vast majority of investors? Most investors, both institut...

Markets are volatile. Not that they ‘can be’ volatile, they  are  volatile. Sometimes, like we saw with the crisis of COVID19 and the resulting financial markets’ response to massive injections of income supports and business bailouts from world governments, they can be terrifying for the average long-term investor. Prior to COVID19, economies and markets were already teetering on the edge of  recession . The only questions seemed to be ‘when’ and ‘how bad’. Frankly, although most analysts and commentators are saying a recession (and maybe a….ummm…. depression ) is now essentially inevitable, nobody has the proverbial ‘crystal ball’ to know for sure what the outcome of all this will be. Your post-COVID19 portfolio may already be down anywhere between 15 and 30% depending on its asset allocations, current events, or the time-of-day. Painful to say the least. Most advisors will tell their clients to stay the course, and historically, that has always been good advi...