{1:50 minutes to read} While the Presidential election is very important to the United States, its impact on one’s long term planning is zero.
The election is very contentious. People have their personal preference over the candidates. Many people despise Donald Trump, and many people despise Hillary Clinton.
{Read in 1:50 minutes} Price fluctuations are a normal part of investing.
The stock market can go up any given year, but the price fluctuations within each day, week or month can go up or down. Long-term investors shouldn’t equate those granular ups and downs with overall risk in a portfolio. Risk is a permanent loss of capital.
Don’t let outside noise interfere with your long-term plan.
The market effectively enables competition among many market participants who voluntarily agree to transact. This trading aggregates a vast amount of dispersed information and drives it into security prices. In 2015, 98.6 million trades a day took place in World Equity Trading and the dollar volume was $447.3 billion a day. (Source: World Federation of Exchanges)
{Read in 1:30 minutes} While informative and knowledgeable, the financial press is backward-looking rather than forward-looking, which means it has no predictive value for the future.
Journalists do a great job of describing what has already happened, but that’s known information, and as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Journalists can’t describe what will happen; it’s not their job to prognosticate the future. They make opinions about trends, but those opinions are not meaningful when it comes to managing portfolios.
We’re pleased to present our Quarterly Market Review for the 2nd quarter of 2016. Please see it in its entirety below. Click here to download a copy.