Investing in the Apocalypse

The Dow
between mid-Feb and mid-March dropped 38%.
between mid-March and mid-Apr (today) rose 34%.
Since mid-Feb the Dow is down 18%.
(Remember that if the market falls from 100 to 50, it drops 50%. If it then raises 50%, it will only be at 75. It takes a bigger % gain to recover than the % fall that got you into a hole.)

This raise of 34% strikes me as irrational. Our economy will not be the same for at least a year. It could easily take years to get back to normal. Profits will drop more than the 18% that the Dow has fallen.

The dilemma is that if you get out of the market and then get back in, you have to be smart on timing twice: you have to know when to sell (best time was 15 Feb and second best might be now) and when to buy (that may be about mid-summer when people finally realize how abnormal the new normal is or even in February of next year when a new administration awakens optimism).

I don't know about you, but I cannot save enough to retire on the 0.1% return of a bank account, and one of the only certainties in investment is that risk and reward go together. If you avoid risk, you will avoid returns.

What are our options?
1. Just ride this out and try not to get cute on timing. This probably means looking at some lousy monthly statements during the next 3 to 12 months. (And probably a couple of exciting ones. It seems safe to say that volatility will continue to be high. Also, as the government pumps money into an economy where people are going out less and consuming less, this money might just find its way into investments rather than consumption, oddly driving up asset prices even as the underlying economy of everyday consumer behavior shrinks.)
2. Sell and wait for months to finally buy in later. The risk is that you miss the sharp rise that could easily characterize the uptick or that you simply sell at the beginning of a surprisingly decent year's gain.
3. Invest in countries and states that are having better success managing the coronavirus. Of course if it is a country like South Korea that is so dependent on exports, even getting your own act together might not be enough when your trading partners are in a deep recession or - worse - enacting xenophobic trade barriers. In this situation, having a great economy is like having a beautiful home in a terrible neighborhood; still not that great. Still, I do think that there will be a return premium on communities that are well managed.
And speaking of well managed, California (and possibly Washington) companies are more likely to benefit from a virtual world and from smart government management to enable their communities to be less hard hit than companies in other regions. CA and WA's companies could be as different from the rest of the nation as any foreign companies.Watch your own behavior. What are you consuming more of? Less? This could be a leading indicator of where profits will flow.

All the above should be taken with a grain of salt. Your best bet is to diversify across time (just buy once a day or month or year or decade depending on what you can afford, regardless of whether the market is reaching new highs each day or seeming to drop into the abyss) and companies / industries / and countries. Still, I have trouble believing that the market is going to have a great run over the next quarter or three. We have yet to get handle on this pandemic, much less what it will take to adjust to a post-coronavirus world that could easily run at about 75 to 95% of current levels for quarters or even a couple of years.

Dow Tops 17,000. Are Stock Market Returns Steadily Improving?

The Dow closed above 17,000 for the week. In the 1999 bull market, it peaked at about 11,500 and in the pre-Great Recession market of 2007, it peaked at nearly 14,000. It is at a new high. I may have to re-think taking advice from the Tea Party. If they are right that he's a socialist, it is terribly confusing that capital markets have performed so well during Obama's administration.

Here's an interesting list ranking stock market performance during a president (using the closing number as the end of the year they left office - typically 9 to 11 months after their successor is sworn in).

	Dow Jones, Avg. Annual Returns

Calvin Coolidge (R)	32%
William Clinton  (D)	26%
Ronald Reagan (R)	24%
Dwight Eisenhower  (R)	19%
George H. Bush  (R)	17%
Franklin Roosevelt  (D)	15%
Warren Harding  (R)	13%
Harry Truman  (D)	10%
John Kennedy  (D)	8%
Gerald Ford  (R)	4%
Lyndon Johnson  (D)	3%
Teddy Roosevelt  (R)	1%
George W. Bush  (R)	0%
William Taft  (R)	0%
Woodrow Wilson  (D)	-1%
James Carter  (D)	-2%
Richard Nixon  (R)	-6%
Herbert Hoover  (R)	-17%

During Obama's administration the market is up an average of 21% per year, which would put him between those other socialists, Reagan and Eisenhower. It would also mean that 4 of the last 5 presidents are among the top 6 administrations in terms of stock market performance. That suggests that market returns have been going up in the last 30-some years.

This chart, however, suggests that it is less a matter of positive years getting better than it is negative years becoming less severe. Perhaps this has nothing to do with presidential policy but instead reflects the fact that the Federal Reserve is getting better at mitigating risk in the market. Market contractions are becoming shorter in duration and less severe. That's enough to help anyone's performance.