The Sum Of Its Parts

By SJS Senior Advisor & Director of Institutional Investment Management Kirk Ludwig.

What do bicycles and portfolios have in common? More than you might think. My son likes to tinker—to take things apart and put them back together, to see how they work. When he was younger, we bought him a new bike, and the first thing he did was take it apart. But, after he was done taking it apart and putting it back together, there were three pieces lying on the garage floor. The bike looked the same as it did before, but when he tried to ride it, something wasn’t right. It still looked like the original bike, but it didn’t work like it was supposed to. You need all of the pieces, in all of the right places, for the bike to function properly.

So, what about all of the components of your investment portfolio? Have they been mindfully assembled? Or do you have some extra pieces like yield, term or liquidity lying on the proverbial floor? All of these pieces are necessary to have a complete, well-designed portfolio.

For example, we find that many fixed-income investors will look only for the highest yielding bond without considering what it may do to the bigger picture. Buying a bond isn’t just about the yield; there are more components to evaluate. We also need to consider maturity, the creditworthiness of the issuer, the structure of the bond (e.g., callable versus non-callable), how the yield compares to similar bonds, and most importantly, how the bond may impact the degree of risk of the entire portfolio.

When we build an investment portfolio, whether it’s a bond portfolio or a diversified portfolio that includes stock and bond exposure, the focus is on how all of the pieces come together, not on just any one component. The value of the design lies in the way all the components integrate and work together.

You could also compare a balanced portfolio to the inner-workings of your car. Sure, all cars need an engine to go. That’s what powers the car. But, a good braking system is just as important—you need to have quality tires and stable brakes to be able to balance the power and strength of your engine. If your engine needed work, you wouldn’t take your car in to have the brakes fixed, or get new tires to correct the problem.

It’s the same with your investments. Instead of an engine, brakes and tires, you have safety, liquidity and return to consider. All have their places in both longer-term and shorter-term investments and serve different purposes. But, all are also useful in designing a balanced portfolio.

At SJS, the MarketPlus® Investing approach is to help you understand risk, first and foremost. Then, we utilize all the parts to construct a portfolio designed to meet your objectives and goals using our MarketPlus models as the cornerstone. We know that investing is different for everyone, just as there are different car options for everyone. We base investment recommendations on what you’re trying to accomplish and knowing what you need to get there. And, finally, by putting all of the pieces in all of the right places to build and maintain a portfolio that can help you get to your destination.

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Important Disclosure Information:

There is no guarantee investment strategies will be successful. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Diversification neither assures a profit nor guarantees against a loss in a declining market.

MarketPlus Investing® models consist of institutional quality registered investment companies. Investment values will fluctuate, and shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than original cost.

Advisory services are provided by SJS Investment Services, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only.

Hyperlinks to third-party information are provided as a convenience and we disclaim any responsibility for information, services or products found on websites or other information linked hereto.

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I Know You Can’t Predict The Future, But….

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By SJS Senior Advisor & Director of Institutional Investment Management Kirk Ludwig.

It’s human nature to ponder what the future holds and what it means to your investments. As the market grapples to understand the long-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, global trade, elections or (fill in the blank), the market continually factors known information into today’s prices, whether we understand all of the underlying factors, or not.[1] With so many variables influencing future market movements, it is a challenge to predict how the markets will respond…yet, investors still try to speculate on what happens next…we can’t help it, it’s our nature!

During periods of great uncertainty, markets can change course quickly, creating high volatility while the markets reprice risk. These periods, like we are experiencing in 2020, can be very perplexing to understand. How can stocks move higher when the future seems so uncertain? Are historically low interest rates signaling slow growth and low inflation for many years to come? What does the rise in the price of gold signal to the markets? These types of questions are endless.

Think of the market like a sports gambling bookmaker. If you were to place a bet on the outcome of a professional sporting event, you’d likely research who has home team advantage, injury lists, top player stats, and all the other factors which may give one team an advantage over the other. The bookmaker, and all the other gamblers, are aware of these same advantages. In order to even the playing field, the bookmaker will create a “spread”, giving the underdog extra points to compensate for these differences. At this point, you’re no longer betting on who wins, but you’re betting on if the spread is correct or not. This is much more difficult to predict!

The stock market, like the bookmaker, is always handicapping all known information. If you’re increasing or decreasing your risk exposure to stocks based on how you believe the current news will impact your investments, know that the market has already priced in these factors. What you’re really betting on is if your expectation is different than what the entire market, on average, is expecting. Again, a much more difficult prediction.

We don’t think that an investment strategy should be built on speculating if the market is accurately reflecting future expectations. More importantly, we think investors should reflect on how their investment strategy is positioned to meet their long-term desired outcomes based on long-term patterns.

At SJS, we focus our attention on the process and design. We develop portfolios to match the risk and return expectations of our clients through broad global diversification with the proper balance of growth and stability to match their long-term goals. We believe design matters most. Having the appropriate exposures to multiple asset classes and market factors improves the likelihood of a successful investment plan and removes the temptation to speculate on current events.[2][3]

If you would like to learn more about how to design your investment portfolio, feel free to reach out to us. We are always here to listen and assist!

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Important Disclosure Information and Sources:

[1] “Eugene F. Fama, efficient markets, and the Nobel Prize.” John Cochrane, 20-May-2014, Chicago Booth Review.

[2] Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment. David Swensen, 2005, Free Press.

[3] MarketPlus Investing® models consist of institutional quality mutual funds. Mutual fund investment values will fluctuate, and shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than original cost.

Advisory services are provided by SJS Investment Services, a registered investment advisor (RIA) with the SEC. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only.

There is no guarantee investment strategies will be successful. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Diversification neither assures a profit nor guarantees against a loss in a declining market.

Hyperlinks to third-party information are provided as a convenience and we disclaim any responsibility for information, services or products found on websites or other information linked hereto.

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The Markets And Economy Are Loosely Connected

Just like walking your dog!

By SJS Founder & CEO Scott Savage.

Why is the stock market so volatile? What is today’s big drop telling us about the economy? What about yesterday’s big jump? Is there a recession coming? Another depression? Will I miss out on a market rebound?

We are experienced enough to know that we don’t know all the answers. But history has demonstrated that over long periods of time, the stock market and the economy are linked. As the stock market goes, so goes the economy. However, in any given year, economic ups and downs can diverge significantly from the direction of the market.

A well-traveled industry metaphor may be helpful in understanding the relationship between the day to day movement of the stock market and the real economy.

Imagine a dog owner steadily walking her dog through the park. The dog is on a leash but doing what dogs do in a busy park on a leash: barking, jumping, straining on the leash. To the left, then right, and then SQUIRREL!

The dog is the stock market, the dog owner is the economy. They end their walk in the park together, but along the way they sometimes move together, sometimes in opposite directions. If you simply watch the dog for a period of time, you might not know WHAT direction they are headed!

So the next time the market goes way up, or way down, we hope the dog owner and their “best friend” analogy will help you keep the long term view. That’s the view—and destination—we had in mind when your investment portfolio was designed in the first place.

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Hope Is Not Our Strategy

By SJS Director of Institutional Investment Management Kirk Ludwig.

We all hope for things, every day. We hope for good weather, we hope traffic flows smoothly, we hope our favorite contestant will be named the winner on the latest TV talent competition. Hope is a part of human nature – a feeling, an emotion we all experience.

But there are plenty of situations where hope just isn’t enough. Hope may be a lot of things, but it is not an investment strategy. Sure, we hope that our investments allow us to save for our children’s college education, or purchase that vacation home, or retire comfortably. In this case “hope” means that we want our investments and planning to pay off so that we can do all the things that we invest for.

Hope – and fear – can affect the way investors evaluate alternatives. When markets are up, and everything seems to be going our way, feeling hopeful is easy. Hope can lead investors to think optimistically about the future, to ask the question: How good can it get? According to Hersh Shefrin in his book Beyond Greed and Fear, an investor who says, “I’m hoping for…” may be willing to accept more risk to reach that goal.

On the opposite side of hope is fear. These two feelings have a way of affecting our ability to make rational investment decisions. So, that same investor who had been feeling hopeful may now feel fearful, saying, “I’m afraid of …,” and may be less likely to take on more risk. (Hersh Shefrin, Beyond Greed and Fear, 2002.)

How emotions influence decision-making forms the basis of behavioral finance, which seeks to explain why investors may make irrational financial decisions. One concept that can affect investors is “hindsight bias,” which often occurs in situations where a person believes, after the fact, that some past event was predictable and completely obvious. Of course, in reality, the event could not have been anticipated. But the way we feel today is likely the result of what we’ve experienced in the past, and this will influence how we feel about the future. In financial markets, as in many other areas of life, a number of events seem obvious in hindsight. We’ve all heard the old saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.” Psychologists believe that hindsight bias allows us to believe that events are predictable to find order in our world. (Albert Phung, Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts, Investopedia.com.)

Advisors provide value by understanding these behavioral tendencies and helping clients guard against them. The advisor advises, adjusting portfolio risk to meet investor needs, not based on their level of hope or fear.

With MarketPlus Investing, we’re not “hoping” that a single stock will do better than the market, or “hoping” that an active fund manager will continue to outperform.

Instead, we’re using science and decades of research to guide us. (Dimensional Fund Advisors, Putting Financial Science to Work, February 2015.) MarketPlus investing is all about science and structure. We share the Nobel-prize winning investment philosophy of Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, and other time-tested theories developed with his colleague, Kenneth French, of Dartmouth College.

MarketPlus Investing is based on four core fundamentals.

1. Markets are efficient and priced fairly.

2. Speculating is futile.

3. Global stocks and bonds have rewarded investors over the long term. History has proven this, especially for those who have a strategy and stick with it.

4. Portfolio design matters most.

Interestingly, not one of those fundamentals mentions “hope.” The financial industry has a way of selling hope, and playing on emotions. By relying on science and “controlling the controllables” to an extent, we can help put your mind at ease. A MarketPlus Investing portfolio is designed to best manage asset allocation, risk and tax implications for you – all while optimizing your expected return for the risk assumed. There are always factors we can’t control. But when we rely on what we know through science, we can reduce the anxiety felt when facing challenging markets, providing peace of mind without leaving things to “hope” or chance.

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You're A Winner (By Design!)

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By SJS Founder & CEO Scott Savage

When you find yourself at your family get-together, or football watching party, and the conversation switches from football, to the kids, grandkids, and golf, to the inevitable subject of the stock market – we want you to know that SJS Investment Services has your back.

When “Cousin Eddie” starts boasting about the killing he made in his Apple or Tyson Foods stocks last year, while conveniently saying nothing about the “hit” his portfolio took on cannabis stocks, recognize you could be just as much the bragger, although you may not even realize it. How so? Well, your MarketPlus Investing® portfolio held this year’s big winners, too.(1) And not just one or two, like Eddie, but all of them. Yes, that’s right – all of them. In fact, as of November 30, 2019, you owned every one of the top 20 performing stocks in the S&P 500 Index in the institutional quality mutual funds that make up your MarketPlus equity portfolio.(2)

Interestingly, the likelihood of Eddie, you, or most people “picking” these individual stock winners in advance out of the pool of 500 stocks, let alone picking all of them, is virtually zero. Some of the 2019 S&P winners listed in the “Top 20 U.S. Equity Performers of the Year” article as of November 30 are quite surprising, such as Xerox Holdings, up 97%, and Chipotle Mexican Grill, up 88%. Others are a little obscure, like COTY, a multinational cosmetics company, which was up 76%, and Copart, Inc., a company that offers online vehicle auctions around the globe, up 86%.(2)

So how can you get in on these winners even before the stock market recognizes them? By implementing the first tenet of MarketPlus Investing: broad diversification.(3) It’s an intentional part of the design of your portfolio to hold most, if not all, of the top-performing stocks found in indexes like the S&P 500. There’s a lot of science behind our proprietary portfolio strategy that puts the “plus” in MarketPlus – and allows you to tell Cousin Eddie a thing or two.

Admittedly, MarketPlus strategies will hold losing, or even the bottom-performing, stock positions as well. But that is part of the strength of the strategy: any given “up year” in the markets is usually driven by a select number of winners. And, as shown in the graph above, the winners will outweigh the losers in an “up year” and provide relative benefit to your holdings even during a “down year.”(4) Holding the winners – even when balanced by some losers – is what we believe to be the key to successful investing for the long-term. And your MarketPlus Investing strategy will hold most of the winners, year in and year out, by design.

So, as we look ahead into 2020, we’ll keep our focus on the numbers and the science. You can have a glass of New Year’s cheer while you high-five Eddie and tell him how great it is to know your portfolio was designed to hold all of the 2019 S&P winners. And you can feel free to emphasize ALL.

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Important Disclosure Information & Sources:

(1) Stock positions held indirectly through institutional class mutual funds.

(2) Financial Advisor Magazine, “Top 20 U.S. Equity Performers of the Year,” 12/11/2019, Raymond Fazzi. Securities cross-referenced with mutual fund equity holdings as held in MarketPlus Investing® strategies.

(3) Diversification does not eliminate the risk of market losses. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

(4) Dimensional Fund Advisors, “Study of Total Market vs. Excluding Top 10% vs. Excluding Top 25%, Performance 1994-2018,” May 2019.

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A Fly On The SJS Wall

By SJS Founder & CEO Scott Savage

Ever wish you could be a fly on the wall?

At times, for instance, such as when you take your car in for service, and leave the mechanic thinking to yourself, “Did my transmission really need that much work?”

Or, how would you like to be a fly on the wall in the locker room when your favorite basketball team loses by two points? How about when they win by two?

We all can’t help but imagine at one time or another what words are said, and what actions are taken when no one is looking, when the public eye is nowhere to be found. Intriguing, isn’t it?

Well, what if you were buzzing around and landed on the windowsill in the conference room at SJS during one of our regular Investment Committee meetings?

You would have a nice view of the great outdoors, and maybe see a deer ramble by. You’d also hear some open and honest discussions about your investments, such as:

• How heavily should we weight international stocks in your portfolio?

• Do we adjust bond duration longer in light of the Fed’s position on interest rate hikes?

• If a change seems compelling, is this the right market condition to implement?

As a fiduciary, we are committed to this level of due diligence. In other words, we sit on the same side of the table with you, whether there is a fly on the windowsill watching, or not.

How can the work of SJS’s Investment Committee benefit you?

• We look for ways to lower your cost of investing. We review the expenses of the funds we recommend to see if there may be an alternative that invests in the same way but costs less, which may help your bottom line. If we see a clear benefit to you that outweighs any potential costs of making changes to your investments, we will make adjustments to your portfolio.

• We review investment offerings that might be appropriate for clients who share a specific need, such as greater tax efficiency or a preference for an investment strategy that prioritizes social responsibility. This extra effort helps us provide investment strategies that are meaningful for you, even if they may not be the best fit for all clients.

• We consider whether rebalancing or tax loss harvesting may be appropriate, either to manage risk or to offset portfolio income by selling investments to realize losses.

By observing this meeting, you’d discover the massive amount of research and thoughtful evaluation that we consider when making decisions on your behalf. You might be surprised by how much work had gone into the design of your portfolio long before you ever flew into our building.

A lot of what you would hear might sound technical and complex, but as the fly on the wall, you also would hear something beyond all that financial talk. You’d hear our genuine concern for you, your family, and your well-being. And if you heard all that, we’d be glad to know you were listening.

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MarketPlus Investing: Choosing Your Target

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By SJS Managing Director Jennifer Smiljanich

In this modern, mobile society, we all face a nearly unlimited menu of choices.

As it relates to work life alone, you can choose to stay at the same company for years, change jobs often, become part of the gig economy, retire and start a second career, or even run a business from your own home. Each path comes with different risks, and rewards.

The same is true with your investment portfolio. There are always many choices to consider:

• What do I invest in – stocks or bonds – or both?

• What about gold or real estate?

• How do I invest – via mutual funds, individual securities, or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)

• When do I invest – should I invest all at once or invest over time?

• When do I need to make any changes?

Helping you answer these questions with a clear understanding of your needs, goals, and preferences is part of the MarketPlus Investing® process. Your MarketPlus Investing portfolio is made up of institutional quality mutual funds, which may include both stocks and bonds.

We think it’s important to take time to make sure that we find the right design for your life situation, with a foundation supported by academic learning and science. We consider many factors in determining the right portfolio mix for you, including your age, income need, time until you need to start taking withdrawals, the length of time you will need that income, your current level of income, and your personal comfort with the ups and downs in the market – to name just a few.

The relative mix of stocks and bonds in a portfolio is the factor we believe has the most impact on expected risk and return. Stocks have historically outperformed bonds, although there have been periods, notably the early 2000s, when bonds have outperformed stocks.

Data Source: Dimensional Fund Advisors

What’s the difference between the two? Stocks offer ownership in a company. If you hold Apple stocks, you own a portion of Apple. In contrast, if you own an Apple bond, you are lending money to Apple, and you are entitled to repayment of interest and principal on your loan. If Apple were to go bankrupt, bondholders have a preferred place in line ahead of stockholders for a return of their investment.

The target mix of mutual funds that may include both stocks and bonds in your MarketPlus investment portfolio likely will vary over time. Typically, the mix will tilt away from stocks and toward bonds as you get older. Other life events may lead you to adjust your allocation – maybe a change in your need for funds, loss of a spouse, retirement or career move, reduced comfort with risk, or an update to your investment purpose. Market factors may also affect your desired allocation, such as the interest rate environment or market cycle changes.

We stand ready and willing to review your target with you, and to help you discern the right choice for you, wherever you are on life’s journey.

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Important Disclosure Information:

There is no guarantee investment strategies will be successful. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Diversification neither assures a profit nor guarantees against a loss in a declining market. MarketPlus Investing® models consist of institutional quality mutual funds. Mutual fund investment values will fluctuate, and shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than original cost.

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MarketPlus Investing® – It Takes Discipline

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By SJS Managing Director Jennifer Smiljanich

The start of a new year always seems to be a good time for reflection. A time to think about the journey we took throughout the past year. A time to look forward to the year ahead. And, a time to think about a certain “D word.” That’s right, Discipline! That difficult thing we know we should work on, but still find ourselves struggling with.

We resolve to do all the right things, to choose to eat healthier, to make time for exercise, and to work on relationships with family and friends. Discipline. It’s hard.

At SJS, our quarterly Investment Committee meetings give us the opportunity to reflect on and to evaluate the discipline of our MarketPlus investment strategy, and what that means to you. Our commitment to you is that we will maintain the discipline of our investment philosophy and our science-based process of designing portfolios to help you achieve your financial goals in an up, down, or sideways market.

At times, we have made adjustments to the way in which we implement MarketPlus Investing on your behalf. Any investment change is subject to careful consideration, and may come as a result of market conditions, investment alternatives offering lower costs, more diversification, or better exposure to an investment premium. Since our beginning in 1995, our portfolios have seen a number of adjustments, about two dozen in total (graphic below).

We do know that it’s not easy being an investor, especially a patient one. As human beings, we are prone to an emotional response when we see the markets go up, and even more so when markets go down. Behavioral studies tell us that losses loom larger than gains – the pain of a loss is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of a gain.[1]

We are here to offer you an ear to listen and a hand to hold when the markets are choppy. And we will continue to offer you a disciplined investment process that puts your portfolio in the way of market returns, and the anticipated benefits of investment premiums supported by academic research.

If we can free up some time for you to focus on the people and the causes you care about, well – that’s just another “plus.”

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Sources:

[1] “Loss Aversion,” www.behavioraleconomics.com.

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Ben Franklin Got It Half Right

Managing Taxes through MarketPlus® Investing

By SJS Founder & CEO Scott Savage

You’ve heard Ben Franklin’s famous words, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” He uttered them way back in 1789, and for centuries, most of us have accepted his belief as inevitable and true. But maybe, just maybe, Ben was wrong about taxes. When it comes to investing, you can potentially avoid taxes, or at the very least postpone them. Death? Well, Ben was right about that one.

Tax planning and tax mitigation are topics that have always been important to the team at SJS. But the 2013 Affordable Care Act’s surtax of 3.8% on the investment income of higher earners makes being smart about taxes even more critical.  The good news for you is that tax planning is inherent in MarketPlus Investing. It’s what we do, and in case you were wondering how we do it, our focus is on four key strategies:

Strategy 1:  Design a portfolio with low turnover to “realize” minimal gains

This time of year, many mutual fund shareholders discover the level of income and capital gains distributions they can expect. And it’s the time of year when many unsuspecting investors learn the unfortunate truth that activity within their funds has left them with the bitter taste of unexpected taxes. For many non-MarketPlus investors, 2014 may not be a good year.

According to Dan Culloton, writing for Morningstar, “After more than five years of generally rising markets, many actively-managed stock funds have exhausted pent-up losses that they usually use to offset realized gains. That, plus the usual store of manager switches, outflows, and profit-taking, has made it difficult for managers to avoid making distributions.”[1] That’s long hand for, “In 2014, investors are getting a tax bill.”

And some of the distribution numbers are downright alarming. Consider these: Black Rock Small Cap Growth Equity (CSGEX) will distribute between 25% and 27% of the fund’s October 10, 2014, net asset value (NAV) to shareholders. That comes a year after the fund paid out a gain that was about 50% of the fund’s 2013 year-end value. Putnam Voyager (PVOYX) anticipates paying out 11% to 13% of NAV in early December.  To add insult to injury, more than 40% of Putnam Voyager’s distributions will come in the form of short-term gains, taxed at higher ordinary income rates. Likewise, Putnam Multi-Cap Growth (PNOPX) will distribute 11% to 13% of NAV before year-end.[2]

Ouch!  These funds are “losers” for tax-paying shareholders. By contrast, MarketPlus Investing portfolios strive to offer a relatively tax-efficient investment process, with disciplined design and low turnover as hallmarks.  We expect that 2014 will be no different with less than a 1% capital gain distribution forecasted for our portfolios this December.  At SJS, we view taxable distributions as one of the aspects we can control.  How? By choosing to invest with fund companies that pay diligent attention to trading and tax efficiencies. This is an important aspect of our service to you because as an investor, it’s not what you can earn, it’s what you keep that matters.

Strategy 2: Offset realized gains through proactive tax-loss harvesting

Throughout the year and in times of significant market corrections, we review the tax lots of your holdings for possible losses.  We look for opportunities to “harvest” sizeable losses by selling a security or mutual fund that has lost value and simultaneously buying a similar investment. You can benefit from this process because it may offset current/future income and capital gains and reduce your tax bill, all while maintaining the same investment strategy. There are limitations and specific rules that we follow, and we often work with your tax professional to take advantage of the inevitable volatility of the global financial markets.

Strategy 3:  Advise our charitably-inclined clients of their gifting options

If you make charitable gifts on a regular basis or on special occasions, or believe a portion of your legacy might include giving to a charitable organization you care about, we can work with your attorney and accountant to make these gifts both philanthropic and tax-wise. Giving away appreciated securities, making gifts from required IRA distributions, changing beneficiaries, and coordinating your estate plans with your attorney are just a few of the ways we can help make a difference in your tax bill.

Strategy 4:  Consider asset location

One of the tax strategies SJS has implemented for years on your behalf is the strategy of “asset location.” If you have tax-deferred accounts like 401(k) plans, profit sharing plans, or IRA accounts, this strategy can benefit you. MarketPlus Investing portfolios employ various asset classes, and some are more tax-efficient than others. Placing the less tax-efficient investments in tax-deferred accounts may help delay the related tax associated with investment income and gains until you withdraw the funds, assisting you in reducing your current tax burden.

While paying taxes is inevitable, there are ways to structure a portfolio and its activity to work to gain control over how much tax you pay, and when you pay it.  Taxes are a fact of life, but you do have options. Options that may help you keep more of your nest egg for yourself and the people and causes you care about. 

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Important Disclosure Information and Sources:

[1]  “4 Funds About to Break Capital Gainless Streaks.” Dan Culloton, 03-Nov-2014, Fund Spy: Morningstar Medalist Edition (morningstar.com).

[2] Sustainable Leaders Fund (PNOPX). Putnam Investments, putnam.com. Ibid.

SJS Investment Services does not provide legal or tax advice. Please consult your legal or tax professional for specific advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only.

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