Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Wild and Woolly World of Bonds

Obviously fixed income vehicles like bonds with regular interest income payments are the easiest asset class to squeeze out a steady come. I read someone on SeekingAlpha say 
"Holding stocks, you are waiting for your horse to win the race whereas holding bonds your horse merely has to finish the race".
Ardennes warhorse superior to racing breeds for everyday

Although the above sentiment is not quite right in boom times as a rising tide lifts all boats (investing is full of conflicting cliches), race horse analogy does hold more water for the more challenging economic times.  I'm not going get too ambitious in a late cycle environment and rely more on fixed income. Also in the worst case, bond holders are paid before preferred stock before common- of course who knows what happens to Tesla bond holders if things do go belly up. I digress.

Bond and fixed income markets are even more diverse than the equity market and there are multiplicity of options to invest in the bond sector. I just know the basics to navigate and evaluate a bond fund with a surface understanding of the basic credit risk and duration risk that I picked up from investopedia.

Buying bonds directly(with the exception of treasuries and preferreds) in this interest lowering environment has been not worth the effort for me. For instance, new municipal bonds are less than 1.5% right now- BART released an insulting 1% 3 year bonds last week but I guess we should be grateful rates are not negative like most of Europe and Japan.  For ease of investing, liquidity and higher rates, I hold high quality bond ETFs and mixed bond CEFs. The advantage of muni bond funds with long durations is that they are hoarding those precious 30 year 5% interest bonds from that bygone era(a soft flute plays) and can payout much higher yields.  Obviously all munis funds have increasing call risk and will have to replace in this low interest rate environment.

 Bonds currently have the following pitfalls:
  • bond bubble- yes, too many people have piled onto anything dishing out a yield
    • even "safe" treasury backed bond ETFs carry significant price risk, see below chart
  • higher yield can mean significantly higher risk without a risk premium to match.  Corporate high yield definitely is a no go zone for me.  5.3% for a corporate junk bonds (HYG, JNK)? No Thanks!  If my quality Muni CEFs are yielding 4.5%, is 80bp worth the leap in risk. Of course not. But even investment grade corporates IMHO carry a higher risk due to BBB downgrade risk.  A few junk bonds in Europe are starting to go zero which is madness.
OMG U.S. Treasuries?
Run up on TLT(2.4% yield on 20 Year Treasuries).
Safe bond fund bubble of unnatural proportion?
Firstly, low yield is NOT ALWAYS to be dismissed as you can hold bond funds for price appreciation as seen in this spectacular example.

TLT(twenty year treasury EFT with 2.23% yield) has had a dangerous run up but if rates go to zero as many hedge fund managers have predicted, can the rally last last longer?  An Austrian century bond paying 2% rose 60% in price this year.  This is where having the original treasury is significantly lowers risk as you will not lose money when you hold it to maturity.

I am currently in short term treasury ETFs and corporate ultra-shorts to park some of my money.

Where to find reasonable yield in a sub-2% fed interest rate environment without being forced too far out on the risk curve?  I've opted for holding Closed End Funds (CEFs) in the municipal space since they use leverage of upwards of 40% to increase yield and give 4+% dividends.   The leverage risk in a falling rate environment is more tolerable to me than trying to get yield elsewhere in corporate space.  I'll have to cover CEFs in another post as there is an art to buying when it goes on a sale and increases the discount.
What's this stock that recently beat the S&P 500 SPY in blue?
PCQ- California muni CEF again.
Sold it regretfully in April since it has an irrational 40% premium.
Here is my brief run down on the various bond categories:
  • govt
    • short-term  
      • actual bonds from the Treasury - not purchasing any more short-term currently as the rates are not favorable compared to the ETFs/CEFs
      • ETFs (VGSH,SHY) -  I use them for safely parking money and for their liquidity.  Definitely these have moderate run ups I'm cautious when adding any more.
    • long-term ETFs(TLT) - there is currently a ferocious long duration treasury bubble so I am avoiding them
    • floating rate(USFR) - bought them early in the year when interest rates were going up but I traded them after Jay Powell turned dovish. However I made the mistake of going into short-term instead of  transferring into long-term treasuries. Floating rate definitely not a good choice in a rate declining environment.
    • TIPs - I'm on the fence on their effectiveness and they have always underperformed the other categories for me.
  • municipal funds- currently my favored bond category of choice and will write more about them. Yes there is potential pension default risk looming but that steamroller is much slower moving and IMHO will arrive later than the other risks.
    • national
    • state - long California
    • high-yield- junk munis are my guilty pleasure since muni junks have lower default rates than corporate. Also, most CEF munis always contain a percentage to boost earnings.  Blackrock recently voted in changes to allow for high yield muni in "Quality" rated muni funds so it may not be possible to avoid them.
  • corporate 
    • ultra-shorts (GSY, VCSH, NEAR,MINT,JPST) currently yield 2.5-2.8% which I use for parking money. Risk premium is definitely not enough to eke out less than 50bps and if there are further fed rate cuts reducing yield, I'll definitely dump these.
    • high quality
      • QLTA has only A rated bonds and it's now overvalued on my watchlist for next time
    • investment-grade - currently avoiding unless ultra short due to looming triple BBB downgrade threat
    • high-yield- a no-go zone
    • senior loans/floating rate loans - avoiding right now
  • agency
    • MBS(mortgage-backed-securities)- dipping a toe in, will update later
Bonds are a more complex space than equities and has a wide spectrum of risk to match.  However the interest rate/default/leverage risks I personally find to be tolerable in the municipal bond CEF space than holding defensive equities for dividends.

Dividends- Getting Paid to Hold

(Dripping Dividends and compounding  is core part of my risk management strategy.)

If you noticed, S&P 500 has not budged between Aug 2018 to Aug 2019.   We also had a lost decade between 2000 and 2012 while Japan has had 3 decades lost.  It's not inconceivable the U.S. markets will see another period of sideways action.
Overall profit even with a 12 year price loss.  PCQ was my favorite fund which
I sadly sold as PCQ is so overvalued right now. I so miss you PCQ.
What's this hot stock to beat the SPY S&P 500 during the lost decade? PCQ is a California muni fund.  You can see the actual stock price PCQ went down significantly from $22.69 to $15.05 in 12 years but overall came out much better than SPY due to its ~5-6% interest payments which reduces capital losses as a risk strategy.  Still $4000 in 12 years is terrible return but better than losing money and more than double the S&P return.    Of course you can win any argument cherry picking the dates, but income generating assets in a sideways markets has proven to me a better return than growth indices. The regular payments which if they are dripped are of critical importance as you get the virtuous double benefits of compounding and dollar cost averaging as the above chart amply shows. Actually you should have been lucky at all even to be in SPY as see Nasdaq ETF QQQ:

You might counter with- how about now! Surely tech has more than amply recovered no? Lets go with the trusty QQQ which I sadly have sworn off never to touch ever since the dot com bubble. What's wrong with the below chart. Is this even correct, hasn't Nasdaq has been in a 8-10 fold rise for 20 years? This totally can't be true... Well it is true if you bought at the top of 2000 which a lot of people including me did. It's still shocking to me that Intel never recovered their 2000 high price.

These charts while true do not match our assumptions that tech should have massively outperformed
just a California muni in the last 20 years.  Only when you don't compound the dividend, tech will win.
So the moral of the story is is DRIP.
You can see in the second chart that dripping is critical as $10K of PCQ returns come from  compounding and dollar cost averaging. The Nasdaq definitely was impossibly irrationally overvalued compared to the general market equities now.

I'm 110% my financial market assets will decline in the coming recession. If we have a side ways market which I am expecting, I absolutely want to get paid regularly and DRIP while waiting to bump by returns.

We alas are no longer in that bygone era where being in all cash at least gave you the comfort of 4% interest in safe investments like CD and treasuries so you have widen your field considerably. I never in my life thought I'd be looking at MLPs and BDCs but I didn't think we would have low interest rates for so long and given negative interest rates in Europe, I should definitely be prepared to see lower rates for longer.

Currently, these are the currently accessible income generating assets in the financial markets with my preferred vehicles in green:
  • bond funds  - Currently overweight. See full post on Wild and Wooly World of Bonds
    • govt - beware of bond bubble in treasuries
    • municipal - overweight due to usefulness to society. some high yield tolerable
    • corporate - favor high quality and ultrashort duration
    • agency- some MBS
  • preferred stocks- Relevant for non-growth era for high yield and more stable stock price. I currently hold individual preferred shares which sometimes can be bought at favorable price at the IPO as well as CEFs.
  • dividend generating equities/funds
  • closed end funds- CEFs which cover all areas mutual funds cover tend to payout high dividends due to use of leverage up to 40%. So a muni CEF can pay 1.4X higher return than a mutual muni fund.
  • hybrid vehicles- mixing equities, bonds, derivatives to hedge risk
  • REITS- attractive dividends. This space is diverse and some sectors are at a discount. I will be filling in detailed posts on REITs later.
  • utilities & infrastructure-  currently adding phase, it's overvalued so I have them on watchlist before adding more 
  • MLPs - It's been a disastrous 5 years since the fracking boom and bust. Being a carbon polluting investment, it should be off my list.
  • BDCs- Still studying, but weary of higher risk 
Above the 3, I am currently overweight municipal bonds, preferred, REITs, and infrastructure utilities.  In this post I just wanted to show readers the benefits of dividends even while the underlying asset is declining severely as a risk management strategy.  I will be filling in detailed posts on REITs later.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Risks- Part I Systemic Risks to Scare Any Human Being

Because flipping has a $300 fee plus repair charges,
I drove this real world dune buggy like a driving test for the DMV.
The absolute joy and fun of a single player game is that one can take the craziest risks because you can most often reload a previous save or start over.*  Dying and resurrecting is the most common game play loop unless you masochistically play on permadeath mode where one careless move is game over.

Back in the real world of money, when you lose, you definitely do not get a redo on the loss. You do get more chances to lose(or win) more money if you have capital leftover or new money to plough.  However for me the feeling of losing big chunks of money was so terrible in the dot com bubble that I haven't risked too much.  And if you haven't lost big chunks of real world money before- you don't know exactly how you will react emotionally.  Most humans will inopportunely panic sell accordingly to the studies.

Before you start constructing your portfolio, there is a tricky sticky balancing act between greed and fear. There is a conceit in Modern Portfolio Theory(MPT) that one can neatly determine how much of a return do you want and how much risk you are willing to bear to get it via a classic stock/bond split.  Behold the classic balanced portfolio of 60% stocks/40% bonds.  For me, this is the WRONG WRONG WRONG way to think about risk management because:
  1. Equities can be much higher risk than people cognitively realize, the 60/40 split could be 90% risk from stocks  and 10% risk from bonds as recognized in Risk Parity but more on that later.
  2. Both bonds and stocks are an incredibly diverse asset class with a wide overlapping spectrum of risk. E.g. you can have utility stocks(bond proxies) that are safer than high yield bonds.  REIT subsectors behave as diverse as stocks and bonds. Preferred stocks act more like bonds.
  3. Risks for a specific asset class do NOT remain static. Risks are heightened at different times in the economic cycle.  All bonds esp. gov't treasury bond funds are going through a crazy bubble right now.
  4. Asset specific crises do occur. If there is a corporate credit crisis as warned by Merrill Lynch, investment grade bonds can tank more than equities.  Think back to 2008. The usually safe gov't mortgage backed security darling Fannie Mae- deemed  “the best business, literally, in America.”  by Peter Lynch long long ago-  tanked during the mortgage crisis. I picked up a few shares for a $1 having the good luck not to have bought in at $80. 
  5. To hammer this in again, even low risk safe haven areas can have a bubble (bit redundant to point 3 and 4) and bubbles have a nasty habit of bursting.  Of course treasury and sovereign bubbles never get as large as equity bubbles but you don't expect to lose 40% in a treasury ETF and if you had the underlying bond, you can hold to maturity.
  6. Most investors for their bond allocation do not buy the actual underlying bond but buy bond funds for ease and liquidity.  401K accounts force you to buy a bond fund and funds have bubble risk different from holding bonds to maturity.
So I try to construct my portfolio in terms of risk I can personally tolerate instead of asset class and different from the standard risk parity model which relies on leverage.  Before I can assess what the risk of any specific asset I intend to hold,  I spent months trying to get a handle on all the terrible things that could happen in order not to scare myself but to make more informed decisions about which risks impact which asset classes and picking among the risks I can tolerate.  I think we are most afraid when we know the least. When I was constructing the below list, so much is intertwined and a crisis may emerge not because one domino falls but multiple negative situations amplify one another.  Here is my growing list of terrors:

Currently Known Systematic and Structural Risks to Cause Declines in Asset Value
  1. Economic cycle risk (inevitable and near)- economies are known to grow and shrink in mechanically understood cycles and it's consensus we are at the end of a historic economic boom - the likes of which the world has not seen.   We should accept the dao of economic cycles. 
    • Overvaluation/bubble risk - everything that rises must also fall. Ironically, there are currently ample number of equities that are not overvalued and at multi-year lows, but  many of the safer bonds are at all time highs as the bond rally has been ferocious.
  2. Credit risk(scary)- We are in the MOST leveraged condition since the invention of money. Too much debt at all levels:
    1. corporate debt (in my top concerns)
      • The biggest fear is the BBB downgrade that may follow after a recession. You can read in excruciating detail the Morgan Stanley report too cutely titled Nature of the BBBeast
      • Is it not madness that corporations would borrow money to buy back stocks to artificially inflate stock prices instead of paying back their real debt?
      • Ironically low underwriting standards may be keeping the bond market "stable" as more lower quality bonds would have defaulted in prior stricter eras causing havoc.
    2. bank debt - are ailing European banks dragging around bad debt more problematic than massively over-leveraged Chinese banks dragging around bad debt? Who will keel over first if government intervention isn't enough?
    3. gov't debt
      • sovereign debt 
        • Many countries(U.S., Europe are at record debt to gdp ratios including the U.S.) U.S. spent 8% in interest payments in 2018, and it's the upward rate of change that is scary (7% in 2017).  However one can console oneself that a good chunk of that goes to Social Security.
        • Ironically, Russia has a cleaner bill of health- $0.5 trillion in debt and roughly the same in foreign currency reserves of which a significant portion is in gold.
        • Lucky for Europe, a lot if their bonds are negative yielding.
      • growing deficits - trillion dollars used to mean something. Can the U.S. get away with printing trillions indefinitely?  
      • state/local government debt - The states with the worst fiscal situation is New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut have structural deficits.
    4. consumer debt
      1. education debt - boggles the mind there is $1.5+ trillion in U.S. alone.
      2. auto debt - $1.25 trillion with rising defaults
      3. credit card debt
  3. Geopolitical/political risk
    • trade tensions, tariffs
      • U.S. and China
      • U.S. against everybody even allies- Europe, Canada, Mexico, India, Brazil 
      • China punishing Canada for handing over Huawei executive.
      • China still punishing Korea for U.S. THAAD missile. 
      • Korea and Japan in a serious confrontation depriving materials for Korean semiconductor business. 
    • European weakness.  European Central Bank has less ammunition for fixing problems given negative interest rates and the self-limiting structure of the EU. But the ailing national banks are a concern.  Germany the strongest of the EU has banking problems while Italy was trying to print bonds in an alternative currency  in violation of EU agreements. You only look at Deutsche Bank stock DB hovering below $7, if it drops under $5, there's a lot of institutional investors that will have to sell. You can see the index for European banks - Eurostox 7 SX72  looks dreadful as it's at a 30 year low, the current price is from 1988.
    • UK- the British tend to be proud of their tradition of bumbling through chaos and that's currently the default- a hard Brexit scenario with Boris Johnson at the helm.
    • China-slowing growth, Hong Kong conflicts
    • South America- Argentina potential for future default with some concerns of contagion
    • income inequality,  political fracturing, rise of populism and nationalism
  4. Central Bank Ineffectiveness Risk
    • Central Banks in Europe and U.S. used a lot of their arsenal since the 2008 crisis.  Europe is at negative interest rates. U.S. is at least at 2%. Both have had massive quantitative easing for a decade. More stimulus after extreme periods of stimulus are not as effective as shown by Japan.
  5. Market & Volatility & Liquidity Risk  
    • Beta risk- Currently being at the long long bull market, most stocks will fall when the general markets fall. Even if you invest in a solid business with a good cash flow, it tends to fall and rise with the markets unless there is remarkable developments. Utilities/REITs/consumer staples have lower beta risk although they too will fall in a severe market downturn.
    • Volatility-volatility has increased alarmingly in the last quarter with wide market swings, exacerbated by bot trading. Volatility is dangerous for the overall market esp. on the downside as it can trigger protective stop loss or stop-limit orders causing a cascade.
    • Liquidity Risk
      • Some ETFs have a market liquidity that the underlying assets do not. The most obvious example is high yield corp bond ETFs like HYG/JNK which can normally be bought and sold with high liquidity but the underlying corporate junk bond market is not really liquid. High Yield is $1.25 trillion market but just avoid this junk sector.
      • Some funds with small market capitalization (esp. Muni CEFs) are traded thinly and so have a lot volatility that does not reflect fundamentals. But you can use this to your advantage.
  6. Interest rate risk - well-known and understood cyclical risks above zero. Negative interest rates are not understood. See Howard Marks memo.
    • bonds and REITs are sensitive to interest rates in either direction
    • low interest rate environment has forced traditionally conservative investors like me further out on the risk spectrum to get yield.  I was really surprised to see Michigan Treasury bought 5 million shares of NLY stock last month(to add to their 18 million) to get that 12.5% yield. NLY is the riskiest bond based asset I own...
  7. Dollar risk
    • devaluation/inflation risk - I've seen first hand how rapidly the dollar buys less and less in the 10 years since '08 crisis and the multiple trillions of dollars pumped in for QEs. I'll write a deep post about this as experts say are heading in a "deflationary" environment.  However everything critical to human life- housing, healthcare,food is rising outrageously. The one bright area hands down where a dollar stretches further every year is in video games- a $60 of today is a quantum leap in value of yester year, and factoring in inflation, they're giving it away. (Actually Epic Games is giving away new games every two weeks in a bid to steal Steam customers.)
    • currency risk 
      • strong dollar risk- if the dollar gets too strong,  emerging market bonds denominated in dollars becomes higher risk
    • reserve currency risk- the U.S. treasury market is strong since we are the de facto world currency. However China/Russia/Iran/Turkey are making deals in the yuan by passing the need for the dollar and demand for treasuries.
  8. Demographic Risk (inevitable)
    • Most nations are experiencing a massive boomer population retirement. The U.S. is based on a consumer economy and retirees tend to spend less. If the wealthiest bulge of the population reduces consumption and will further do so in an imminent recession,  we might see a deflationary cycle that is hard to break. Japan has been trying for 3 decades.
    • If we have a severe market downturn (35%), will the boomers take money out of the market in a bid to staunch the bleeding and preserve what they have left and not get back into the markets? Boomers hold the greatest percentage of wealth, reducing buyers of equities overall would be another downward pressure.
    • U.S. entitlement programs Social Security and Medicaid are predicated on a growing population and are now at increasing risk. See next. 
  9. Pension crisis risk (so scary no one talks too much about it)- U.S. federal/state/local gov'ts, universities, and many institutions providing pension plans have serious shortfalls in their pension funding.  The gap is estimated in the trillions and can widen during a recession. There are some deleterious knock on effects
    1. Higher tuition costs- universities have to payout extremely generous pension plans which take an increasingly higher portion of the budget.  Just keeps on adding to the education debt crisis.
    2. City revenue diverted from necessary infrastructure spending to cover pension payments
Wait but there's more!

Classic alien invasion in SimCity 2004. This game was so ahead of it's time.

Non-Systematic Risks and Other Dangers
  • Environmental Risk  (real and rising)
    • global warming
    • increasing droughts that threaten water supply and food security which leads to political instability
    • extreme temperatures, extreme storms, hurricanes 
    • rising sea levels 
  • Idiosyncratic Risks - something unique to that asset and can be diversified away
    • hopefully one time company problem like a sexual harassment scandal or an E Coli outbreak 
    • Boeing's 737 Max problems stem from an established trend of cutting costs in software development but they are in a unique vertical.  If people knew their plane's security systems was the work of subcontractors out of India that had no background in aviation being paid as low as $10/hour, they probably would avoid Boeing. Causing hundreds of deaths, there should have been more outrage and Boeings stock tanking much further. I think being included in numerous passive ETFs protected the Boeing stock.  
  • Disruption risk- this is a slower moving beast that one can avoid/benefit by bein open-minded and paying attention to trends
    • most shopping mall retail is getting killed by on-line retail
    • streaming over cable/tv
    • electrification- Oil sector has taken a hit not only because of shrinking demand but perception of the environmental ills of fossil fuels and their eventual demise.
  • Exotic Cosmic/Geologic Risks - something I don't lose sleep over since there is such a low probability of happening but put here for completeness. 
    • MSE (massive solar eruption) that damages our electricity grid. I guess bitcoin would be kaput as would be our modern financial system.
    • Volcanic eruption
    • (I'm not putting Impact Events/Comet even though they wiped out the dinosaurs since humans have way more on our plate.)
  • Black Swan Risk - unknown unknowns that kill you. It wouldn't be the mortgage crisis since many keen observers were expecting a crisis and made quite a bag of money off their predictions.  Probably it was a black swan event for the granny who was clutching her Royal Bank of Scotland stocks- she would have never predicted her $200 a share stock would still be $4 after 10 years with zero hope of regaining her initial investment.
Given so many potential pitfalls plaguing the world economy, I'd better have at least the basis of a risk management strategy going forward in the increasingly volatile tail end of an economic cycle.   In the next post I'll cover what I am currently doing to mitigate some of the risk as I don't want to mindlessly plough in funds to passive index funds.  And strangely after this exercise, I felt pretty calm during this wild week of 800 dow points evaporating and reappearing.

(My risk management strategy summarized here.)

Making game saves expensive and precious with Saviour Snapps in Kingdom Come Deliverance.  Cost of 100 groschen is no laughing matter for a poor peasant boy.




* Not all games give you the freedom to save and reload willy nilly which players can abuse for a better outcome known as "save scumming". There are games that take a hardline against save scumming.  In Kingdom Come Deliverance, you can't save unless you sleep in your bed or a inn plus you have the option to drink a liquor called Savior Snapps which is prohibitively expensive to do too often and gives you a debuff.  Warhorse Studios took a huge risk in taking away the save button.  I was lost in the middle of the forest and traveling at night worrying about a bandit attack. I only had 2 Savior Snapps in my satchel that I was reserving for an emergency and it really heightened the survival intensity in a way I hadn't experienced in my other savable games.


Sunday, August 4, 2019

Time Diversification

    Over the long haul, we are all cosmic dust.
True time is something even the richest billionaires can not buy more of and youth have firmly on their side.  

Time is the essential ingredient in investing not only to dollar cost average into positions but time to benefit from the growth of the economy or to recover from losses. When you have less time to invest,  less time to compound growth is overshadowed by greater potential risk of not having enough time to recover from losses.  The brutal reality in today's market where the risk free rate is ~1.5%,  if one can't accept the potential significant drawdowns of the market due to a lack of time, one has to take less risk and accept lower returns.  As Howard Marks emphasizes,  the overvaluation of equity markets at all time high does not mean markets will go down tomorrow but the risks are elevated to do so.

Continuous investing with compounded dollar cost averaging(DCA) is THE critical strategy in any market including sideways and declining ones.   Achieving time diversification in building a portfolio is a big conundrum for those who have to invest a big amount in a short period of time.  As I am trying to thaw out my money from the permafrost of low bank rates starting in April of this year, I had to decide if I would put all the money to work right away(lump sum investing) or simulate some form of dollar cost averaging over the course of the year.  But I do not like false dichotomies if either or as the philosophy of diversification advises some measure of each.
  • DCA vs lump sum investing - As we are at the end of an unnaturally long economic growth cycle sustained by gov't intervention of stimulus, low interest rates and corporate tax cuts, I found it prudent to start with dollar cost averaging with equities, but lump sum invest the safer bonds.
    • More importantly, I needed to learn more before jumping into equity funds. In hindsight, had I put a large chunk of my money ~4/15 in VOO/VTI, I would have had a whole lot of heart burn and a daily thrashing of a loss/profit pendulum which may have made me retreat further into my bunker.
    • This blog post explains the benefits of DCA over lump sum with DCA winning out because over time, U.S. markets historically tend to go up. Lucky us. (Not so for Japan and most European/South American countries).  However if we are hit with another lost decade(2000-2012), I'll be gray haired before I can declare victory with lump sum investing.  Dollar cost averaging wins for providing mental comfort.
  • Dripping dividends are key since you will compound the continually investing returns.
  • I could automate transferring a fixed amount into a no commission equity fund which I've been holding off currently. 
  • I try not to churn more than 5-10% of my portfolio a day in buying  so I don't make any rash decisions that would impact the portfolio unduly.  However there were days of rare opportunity that I definitely missed.
  • Patience vs itchy fingers- After hearing Warren Buffet is sitting on a $122 Billion hoard of cash,  I realized I should not hurry to deploy my cash. Waiting for opportunity has not been too terrible at 2.5% dividend yield which has been slowly shrinking to less than 2%.

This beautiful foyer is from the most excellent Skyrim mod Clockwork and has working hands that chime on the hour. This mansion is more impressive in VR than a flat image can convey.  The author must have devoted hundreds of hours to bring about this complex mod that has multiple dungeons that are more impressive than what Bethesda has created in the vanilla game.