Plan on your Plan not going according to Plan

Off to a good start....

Why invest without an endgame? If you do, that's not very Meta of you. Goal based investing has been one of the best ways to stay strong in hard times.

Going back to March 2020, the pandemic panic selloff was brutal… and for good reason! Coronavirus was novel and we had no idea how devastating is was going to be.

Focusing on your goals gives you strength to get through nasty bear markets. How do you actually do this though? Well, here is a few best strategies: curate your stock/ETF Wishlist, focus on the factors you can control, and make time for the non-investment parts of your life...you have those right? 😬

This wasn’t the first time we have had a black swan-esque event rock our investable markets and certainly it will not be the last. Nonetheless, let’s break down the three most helpful tasks you can focus on to get through the darkest of times.

1) Curate a Stock/ETF Wishlist: I use a couple websites for this. They are FINVIZ.com and koyfin.com. FINVIZ is great for paper trading portfolios and setting up target prices for securities. The key here is as the market drops you can watch your favorite stocks get closer and closer to your buy points. Additionally, FINVIZ will consolidate a TON of market data on to each page. Once you know where everything is you will have a substantial amount of data to help you with your stock selection and trades.

This is actually how we selected our fantasy football draft order in 2019. STZ won the league.

One of the best layouts for analyzing factor data.

​Koyfin is a bit different and works best for my analysis after security selection. Additionally, if you like factor analysis and dissecting ETFs Koyfin is second to none. Every allocator I have introduced this software to has made it a part of their morning trading setup.
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Ok, so now that you have the tools. Play around with the screeners and start building your wishlist. Make a watchlist of all the companies you wish you could buy when the rest of the world is having a fire sale.

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2) Focus On the Factors You Can Control: this section could be a whole post on its own (and will be future posted right here!. One example that isn’t as obvious as having an asset allocation, reducing trading fees, or setting up automatic periodic investments, is managing your asset location.

When you are Meta you definitely have a Traditional IRA and Roth IRA in addition to your brokerage account. Making sure that your riskier trades are in the brokerage or Roth and your dividend payers are in your Traditional will add many basis points of return to your long term averages (you track those right?). 😑

3) The Non-Investment Parts of your Life: Early on in my career as a professional allocator I made a point to save opinions from famous stock market personalities. I wanted to keep them accountable to their forecasts. PMs like Bill Gross, Peter Schiff, David Rosenberg, Richard Bernstein and Jeff Gundlach come to mind. And you know what I observed: the Allocators that were more successful started discussing non-investment themes and started using non-financial market information to shape their worldview. The least successful allocators doubled down on their flawed perspectives and try to cast doubt as their trades got further and further away from their price targets.

More importantly though, leaving your workstation behind to learn something new, to experience something grand or to help someone in need will be a much greater reward than trying to force yourself to find your next trade. And to be honest, that is exactly how a lot of botched trades find their way into your portfolio. Stepping away creates FOMO but you have to fight it.

With all that being said, what’s the Metagame? Well in this case it’s to make sure you never purposefully back yourself into a corner. Not if, but WHEN you Plan fails, having contingencies will give you something constructive to focus on. Do you like great business with prices 35%-50% off (YES!), do you like Roth conversions at much lower cost basis? (yes again) and do you love that roadtrip to Florida you've been putting off for years! ...now that's Meta.

Give yourself an opportunity to fight another day and be rewarded with the unbelievable returns of compound interest.


Music bed provided by: Meet Me @ The Altar