Buying 15% allocation to RSP
Buying 15% allocation to Invesco S&P 500 Equal-Weight (RSP)
I'm pretty convinced we're in a bear market, have been for a while, and may be for an extended time. Even so, during most bear markets there comes a time when sentiment gets so stretched that even a small bit of "less bad" news can stoke a multi-week or multi-month relief rally.
We may have reached that point, as I note in a SentimentEdge piece today. Dumb Money Confidence has dropped to the 4th-lowest level since we began calculating it in late 1998, and Smart Money Confidence is high.
When there is such a wide spread between them, even during bear markets, the S&P 500 has never NOT rallied over the next 1-3 months. There can be some massive short-term volatility (witness March 2020), so a safer route is to wait until sentiment actually starts to recover a bit. That's an entirely valid strategy, and probably a more prudent one for the very short-term risk-conscious. But as always, I don't particularly care about intraday or daily moves; I'm almost entirely focused on the next several months.
Price behavior like we've seen over the past few days marked the low in the S&P in October 2011, December 2018, and March 2020. It also happened at the bottoms in 2002 and 2008...but not before several false bottoms before that, so during those meltdowns, it was not a good reason to step in.
An old cliche is that you should buy when you don't want to, and I don't particularly want to. I don't like buying into rallies in bear markets, which is what we're seeing today. It's all about a personal comfort level with risk versus reward, and I feel like now the risk of a 5-10% decline over the next 1-3 months is considerably smaller than the potential for a 10% - 15% rally so I'm moving back to a more neutral weight from what had been severe under-weight in stocks.
Not intended as investment advice. In this account, we roughly follow what has become known as the All-Weather portfolio popularized by Ray Dalio. It allocates across four broad assets, designed to hold up no matter the market environment. The goal is modest positive returns while limiting large, sustained losses. We typically use popular ETFs, with low costs. At times, we will swap out for a fund we believe has better prospects, or simply lower fees if not. At other times, we will diverge quite a bit from baseline allocations, largely depending on the indicators and studies we discuss on the site. The base allocation includes stocks (35%), bonds (35%), gold (5%%), commodities (5%) and cash/other (20%).