Chaim Investment Advisors
Tax Season Newsletter
Holiday Schedule
We’ve been in the “few and far between” holiday season. Some of you may know, I took my little ones on a vacation to Los Angeles for Frieze L.A., the art fair. That wasn’t so much a holiday as it was an art-seeing vacation.
With that said, we are going to have holidays again!
Passover
April 22nd-April 30th.
We’ll be totally offline from Monday night on the 22nd (Seder time!) until Wednesday the eventing of the 24th.
Shavuot
June 11th-June 13th.
We’ll be totally offline from Tuesday night (the 11th) until Thursday the 13th.
LAST CALL FOR TAXES!
It’s the time of year where I’ve been answering questions about IRA’s, SEP IRA’s, Solo401(k)’s, etc., every day for the past couple of months. As always, I am already relieved that I’ll have something more interesting to talk about with investors.
There are ~15 more days to ask questions about IRA’s, SEP IRA’s, Solo401(k)’s, etc., for 2023's tax year. Last call for tax season emails is coming up!
Also as always, if we routinely meet about this time of year to talk about financial implications of the savings and investments of the past year, this is the 2nd most popular time to do that (after High Holidays is the other most popular). There are plenty of May times on the calendar for those meetings though April itself is quite busy right up until tax day. It’s a great time to make those meetings before everyone else has the same idea.
Happy end of tax season!
Market News & Events
Markets have “been doing really well” or have been doing pretty mediocre depending on how you measure the market. Continuing the theme of late 2023, AI linked stocks and investing themes have been in the driver’s seat of “market” pricing. Why do I keep putting “market” in quotation marks? Because market averages have become very distorted by AI stock pricing and markets are actually a bit of a bargain if you ignore those stocks.
Using Capitalization Weighting, you’re paying about $21 for ever one dollar of earnings for the S&P 500 right now. That’s if we let Tech & AI stocks have the weight markets have given them. On a cyclical adjusted basis, it’s higher at $35 for every one dollar of earnings- more than twice the long run average of $17.10.
Looking at the Equal Weighted index, the metric is $17.07 for each dollar of earnings. Buying equally weighted or fundamental weighted stocks right now is actually quite cheap. For things to be really cheap, I usually like to see this below $15. but it has been many years since that actually happened. For recent times, markets that aren’t Cap Weighted are a good deal in my opinion and I have been recommending in rebalances giving some weight to Equal Weighted or alternatively weighted portfolios.
Interest Rates are driving the other side of the market, as always. Markets have been debating the “Dot Plot” of Fed expectations. What it shows is a gradual ratcheting down of interest rates, with the average about 0.9% down by 2025. Markets have been unnerved by the unusually wide range of dots.
upcoming Classes
classes are always free!
5/9
6 pm
The Anticapitalist investor (LINK)
Class 1.: Introduction to Anticapitalist Investing
Sign up on eventbrite for this zoom class where we'll talk about anticapitalist investing. What is anticapitalist investing? Isn't it an oxymoron (it isn't)? How do you get started? I answer these and discuss some of the basics of anticapitalist investing.
4/25
6 pm
Index Investing for Radicals (Link)
Critical approaches to investing in indexes.
Index investing is soemthing that is supposed to be easy according to Mutual Fund sales people and elements of the financial media. For Radical investors, decision making around indices is more nuanced. I discuss some approaches to thinking about index investing for Radicals that delves into details on how indexing is really done and which index style might be appropriate to investigate.
Gold Price Highs
Gold has been hitting many sequential all time highs. That might sound like a bad thing going forward for gold. Some people are calling this a “mystery.” I thought I’d offer some perspective. As many of you know, my history with gold investing long predates my time as a financial planner, and it’s something I own myself in multiple formats.
The reason that gold tends to hit many highs in a row in cycles is that the largest driver of gold prices for US dollar based investors is currency weakness. While the US Dollar is not actually weaker right now, what gold markets are pricing in is future weakness.
The price today of any asset is the sum of all of the future cash flows discounted back to a current dollar, and gold prices are extremely sensitive to both demand changes (because there’s not that much of it!) and future changes in currency values.
Both of these factors are positive for gold, with central banks purchasing & a good correlation set up.
The C.I.A. Reading list
What we're reading about right now
Chinese Deflation matters a great deal. Not just for China investors; not just for Europe investors (Europe exports a great deal to China); it matters to all investors as it is a key element of the Global economy.
Chinese Deflation Problem
All investment theses in 2024 rely heavily on interest rate cuts. A fed official recently rattled markets with contrarian comments.
Something that everybody who has looked at Zillow, talked to anyone, or read any news this year knows is this: housing affordability is dangerously off the rails.