| AAPL |
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| ABBV |
| AMZN |
| APH |
| ARKK |
| AVGO |
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| CAT |
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| SHW |
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Why no exposure to precious metals and miners? And why are you hanging onto SHW?
I got my fingers burned with lithium. Am fearful of commodities. I did add 4 gold stocks to my watch list. Best performer is AU. Will be watching. More comfortable with tech stocks. Also no bit coin on my list.
Just split accounts into irrevocable trust revocable trust and ira. Growth stocks went to irrevocable trust. Revocable trust is loaded w stocks too costly to sell. So now looking to boost growth rate of revocable trust stocks.
Once cap gains gets over $100K its costly to sell. Better to let heirs inherit at stepped up basis.
I have owned Sherwin Williams for years and it has done very well for me. Tends to be tied to housing starts. Home building seems likely to recover one of these days. Will make decision on what to sell each month on the 20th. SHW might come up. Plan is to decide what to buy and then how to fund it. Which under achiever has the least cap gains impact. Itemized deductions should let me do more capital gains at same tax bill.
Paul,
What a thoughtful, honest answer. Thanks. Your answer also underscores how each investor is different and how those differences are reflected in the portfolios we build for ourselves. I’m comfortable trading commodities, because their fundamentals tend to be obvious, and I avoid tech like the plague, because it isn’t a part of my world except in very peripheral ways.
As for SHW, I think its fate is tied to an economic recovery that isn’t going to come. I could be wrong about that, of course. But that’s the way I’m betting. Hence, my preference for counter-cyclical plays like precious metals.
They do tell us we have a housing shortage. That is likely to be addressed one day. Falling interest rates should help. Strong economy should help. But may require patience.
Housing starts drives a lot. Whirlpool, carpeting, furniture, chemicals, paint, hardware. Recovery would be nice. I’m watching for signs.
Is the “housing shortage” a real lack of houses for people or a reduction in supply by financial predators? I’m cynical enough to favor the latter explanation. That aside, the US economy isn’t strong by any of a dozen metrics, and there will be no recovery in the near future.
I recently saw article claiming arrival of immigrants causes rent to rise. Rising rent has to be part of the lower middle class financial squeeze. Shortage means they cannot afford housing that is available. And more become homeless.
The challenge is building affordable housing. But builders find it less profitable. So they build for upper middle class or previous homeowners w equity and moving up.
What is the solution? Govt housing? Govt housing supplements? Zoning laws that allow smaller more affordable housing. Zoning discrimination against the poor is part of it.
This country is rich enough and savvy enough to fix “the housing problem” in dozens of ways. What is lacking from either party is the political will to do so.
Time machine. That’s all we need - a good, well-working time machine.
Folks looking for the root cause of our current housing affordability issue can see it pretty clearly in the below chart:
New Privately-Owned Housing Units Started: Total Units (HOUST) | FRED | St. Louis Fed
…in which we see that new housing construction collapsed in the wake of the 2007-2008 Housing Crisis, and never entirely recovered. Housing starts fell below 1.2 million in late 2007, and didn’t consistently recover above 1.2 million until early 2019 or so. Basically a decade where the U.S. housing market produced about 10 million fewer homes than it “should” have done.
Again, homes are like cars. Used homes are cheaper homes, and new homes are more expensive. Affordable homes are homes that have some wear, have amenities that are a bit out of style, have a layout that isn’t exactly what folks look for in a home these days, and might need a bit of a touch-up by their next owner. Homes that are 10-20 years old are going to have those “features,” and there’s a lot fewer of them because of the Great Housing Bust than there “ought” to be.
I mean, there’s a lot of other reasons. Lack of housing supply is a bit overdetermined: seniors holding onto homes longer, Americans’ retreat from mobility, higher interest rates freezing home sales, ever-increasing NIMBY’ism and regulation over decades, even Baumol’s Fricking Cost Disease. But again, a big part of why we don’t have enough houses in 2026 is because we weren’t building enough houses twenty years ago.
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And of course we know this was right after the no-doc loan crisis when many home owners lost their homes and probably their equity. It was a major shock to the system. And you are not surprised all players became more cautious.
If we build more affordable houses I think people will buy them (if we locate them in the right place–in spite of NIMBY).