Possibly The Worst Time to Invest – 4 Years On

This once-a-year post probably sounds like a broken record, but 4 years after I thought it was a bad time to invest (due to record high Dow Jones Industrial Average and record low interest rates then), the DJIA has not crashed yet, despite a series of corrections along the way, with the most recent one in Feb. I have 2 passive portfolios invested in index funds and adopting the portfolio rebalancing strategy. The plain vanilla portfolio has 70% in global equities and 30% in global bonds since Dec 2013, while the spicy portfolio has 70% in US equities and 30% in Asian bonds progressively built up over 2015. 

To-date, the plain vanilla portfolio is up by 31.4% while the spicy portfolio is up by 24.2% since they were started approximately 4.5 years and 2.5 years ago. Needlessly to say, had I worried about the high stock prices and low interest rates back then and not started the 2 portfolios, I would not be sitting on such paper gains. 

I am tempted to allocate more money from my active investments to the 2 passive portfolios, considering that all it takes is to monitor occasionally whether the relative allocation between the equities and bonds has moved significantly away from the initial allocation of 70% stocks and 30% bonds and rebalance them when it happens. In contrast, active investment requires a lot of hard work. I need to read the financial statements and annual reports, attend Annual General Meetings, understand pricing strategy and competitors' activities, etc. to understand how well the business is doing. Just take a look at M1, a stock that I blogged about recently. I spent no less than 6 posts (and another 3 posts on its competitors) to describe the various aspects of M1. Even then, there are probably still a lot of areas about M1 that I do not understand. Furthermore, the size of my M1 position is only 1/3 that of the 2 passive portfolios!

So, would I be worried if I were to invest more into the 2 passive portfolios and the crash finally happens? Obviously, I would be quite upset if it were to happen, but I would attribute it more to bad timing. One way to mitigate this risk is to spread out the investment, similar to what I did when I initiated the spicy portfolio. The plain vanilla portfolio was a lump-sum investment in Dec 2013, but the spicy portfolio was built up over 12 months in 2015. Furthermore, the rebalancing strategy will ensure that if stocks were to crash significantly, the bonds would be sold to buy more of the now cheaper stocks. There is inherent defence mechanism in the portfolio rebalancing strategy.

This time next year, I am not sure if I will be happy or upset over my 2 passive portfolios (which depends on whether the crash happens or not), but likely, it will be business as usual.

See related blog posts:

• Possibly The Worst Time to Invest
  
• Possible The Worst Time to Invest – A Year On
• Possibly The Worst Time to Invest – 2 Years On
• Possibly The Worst Time to Invest – 3 Years On
• Possibly The Worst Time to Invest – 5 Years On
• Possibly The Worst Time to Invest – 6 Years On