¶ Intro
Welcome back. Everybody. Thanks for joining on this episode. It's been obviously, a very busy Newsweek. We have Biden beating Trump. That's the headline story. That's the biggest news. Now. I know you've been blasted with politics for the past week. I don't plan on reiterating everything that's been said and every opinion and everything like that. But I do want to talk about the elections especially going forward. What I see is going to happen
with investors. I'm going to give my thoughts on how I think we should view the market. We also had some big news outside of politics that happen the past week, but of course, it got Got buried because of the elections going on the stock market. For one had an incredible week. It was on fire. It went up 7 percent. The S&P 500 was up. Seven point three percent in the last five days.
That is an incredible week. One of the best we've had all year long now, I don't mean to say I told you so but my video One Week Ago said why I'm buying and I gave my thoughts on the market and I thought that eliminating the election outcome as a - Catalyst as something, unknown would make it so on. Esters can breathe a little bit easier and I have more thoughts on this going forward. I think, overall right now.
We are in the early stages of a bull run even with this huge run up that we've had in 2020. I still think we're just getting started with it. So I'm going to explain my thoughts on the market going forward and how I plan on investing and taking advantage of it. Now, with that in mind. I will be going over my portfolio in depth. We're going to be going over every single company and I'm going to give my rating on whether I think it's a strong company to own or a week one.
And I'm even going to be looking at a couple that I might. Be selling out of over the next week. So we'll be talking about that as well. And then of course, at the end of this episode, we have a lot of emails and questions that get to as well. Now, we have a busy episode lots to get to before jumping into all of that. Check out the patreon. You can join now for free and you can get in till the end of the month for free. So you have a trial period. There's no risk. It's cancel anytime.
You're not locked in anything. If you join, you get access to exclusive episodes. A Discord Community as well as a dividend tracking website. It's a portfolio analysis and dividend tracking. So you get all of that included. So it's six bucks a month. You can try it out for like, 3 weeks for free. There's a link in the description. If you want to give that a shot.
¶ Biden wins, my thoughts
Okay, let's jump in and get to the headline news by it and beat Trump. It's not like officially called right now. There's still some lawsuits, Trump really hasn't conceded. So there's a chance that things could flip, but I really don't think that that's going to happen. All the major news networks have called the wind for biotin. It looks like it's not something that's going to be turned around.
So as it stands right now, by Odin has beat Trump, but It doesn't look like the Democrats have made gains everywhere. Republicans made some pretty significant gains in the house. Flipping a seats. That's a 5. Net gain. So that was a win for republicans in the house. Democrats still will hold the majority. And then in the Senate Republicans have also defended key seats. Not letting the Democrats, take over the Senate so far. There's still an unknown with this outcome.
But as it stands right now, Republicans still hold the advantage in keeping control of the Senate. So this is something that we can look at as a positive for investors. You put all the politics to the side, everybody wants their side to take control of everything. But if we put that to the side for a minute, most of the time investors, like having certainty, the more unknowns, the more uncertainty, the less investors like that.
So when we see Biden winning, but we also see Republicans taking some control of the house and also maybe keeping control of the Senate that creates a split government and a split government. It's less likely for Extreme Measures to be taken and extreme bills to be passed on either side investors view that as a positive.
Of Biden will probably be able to push along a lot of his agenda, but not as aggressively as you could, if you controlled all three branches of government, so we don't know how this will turn out, but I think investors will view it as a positive, if Republicans do, keep majority control of the Senate. So that's where we're at right now. The Democrats controlled the executive branch with biotin being president.
The Democrats also remain control of the house, but the Republicans made some major gains in the house. And it looks like Republicans will continue to keep control in the Senate, but that still up for grabs. So we could see the out. Of that flip, but right now it looks like most likely. The Senate will remain a republican control over all. This has been received positively for investors in terms of investing has been positively received, but obviously this isn't the outcome
that everybody wanted. Now, I want to talk about this for a little bit. I didn't have anything prepared, but I want to share some thoughts on this. I'm 31 years old and I've been through a few elections, and I noticed some patterns. I notice the same thing happening over and over again. That is that people get very attached to politics. They get very attached to politicians. Ins they become really invested in politics in the outcome of it.
It becomes almost a part of their identity to be on their political side. And then when their candidate loses, they can become devastated because of it. I see this happening more and more. As we have social media and politics is shared more widely. It becomes ingrained in almost every part of our Lives. It's very difficult to avoid at this point, but I tweeted out the night before the elections. Remember people there's more to life than politics. It's called money.
Now I said this a little bit tongue-in-cheek, I said, Little bit as a joke. I understand that. There's much more important things than money. Your relationships, your health, your family. All those things are more important than money. But when I actually look at this tweet and say that there's more important things to life than politics, your money. I think there's some truth to that politics. You have very little control over.
Whoever happens to be president likely isn't decided by you. That's the truth, everybody. Tries to vote. We all give our input on the direction of the country, but at the end of the day, we all have very little control over it unless you are one of the voters in one. Of those very specific districts, that decided the election. You probably didn't have too
much of an impact. On the other hand, your money, and your finances, and your Investments, and your decisions, with your career, have a substantial impact over the direction of your life. The Comforts that you'll have that stability, that you'll have the stress that you'll have the environment that you raise your family. In. All of that is directly impact by the amount of wealth that you're able to have. I think that focusing on money is not a selfish thing to do.
I think that growing money. An honest Endeavor that everybody should try to do. If you can grow wealth in your family. If you can put yourself on to a better financial future. That's something that I think will have a big impact on your life regardless of who's President. And most the time.
I think that politics is a distraction from doing that if people focused more on their own wealth on their own family getting themselves in a better financial position, it gets you a lot further than knowing all the political issues of the day. So that's what I plan on doing in this episode is focusing on. The money not worrying about the politics. Not worrying about who becomes president.
If we talk about politics, it's going to be through the lens of how do we use it to further our finances. How do we use it to make more money? And on a second note. I think it's cool to see that in this Channel. And on this Discord. We have people in this channel that are Republicans. We have people that are Democrats. We have many people that aren't even Americans there in Canada. They're Europeans their Asian Pacific countries, they're from
all over the place. But all of them have something in common. Everybody wants to have a better Financial. Sure. So, in my opinion, focusing on money, trying to generate wealth, having a better financial future with more stability. That's something everybody should be doing. So, let's talk about how we do that. First of all, I want to give my
¶ A market update
thoughts going forward on the market in general and the economy. I think that we've had multiple negative factors in the market that have created a lot of uncertainty. One of them, of course, was the elections. Nobody really knew how it was going to play out. Everybody can look back and say that they predicted it, but really nobody knew when Trump was In Florida, I thought this looks a lot like 2016. He wasn't supposed to win, Florida, according to the polls.
And here he is, winning Florida. So there was a chance that Trump could have won this created uncertainty when investors don't know what's going to happen, or what the future is that in and of itself creates some uncertainty. Now that we see things playing out, the people that remained in the market, that kept their nerves. Cool. They're being rewarded. They got rewarded with seven percent returns in one week. So that was one - In the market, the elections.
I see, two more negative factors in the market that still need a play out. And that is the economy and the coronavirus. I see these as the two biggest negative factors - catalysts in the market right now. One of these is being repaired, The Wall Street Journal reported that employers added six hundred and thirty eight thousand jobs. Last month, the six straight monthly gains and the jobless rate fell to a percentage of 6.9%. So out of the 22 million, we've gained back over half of them.
That's some really good progress. Progress to have already. And having an unemployment rate of 6.9% That seems really good to me. We were talking about unemployment rates of 20%, just a few months back. So, the economy is recovering. I'll be a little bit slower than some people I predicted or a little bit slower than they wish.
But the fact is the economy is recovering, that is one major negative factor in the market and it's steadily improving the Wall Street Journal reported that the economy overall has rebounded quickly from the recession. Gross, domestic output grew at a rate. Kurt of 7.4 percent in the third quarter Redeye 33.1% annual rate. So, not only are we gaining back more jobs, but the GDP is improving.
This is positive news. This is positive data that's being shadowed by the bigger, news of the elections. But this is very important on the list to have all these people returning back to work and they're getting off of unemployment and they're starting to contribute to the
GDP. So when we see this type of news, that's one more - Catalyst that I think will improve over time making this uncertain environment even Than certain the other - or uncertain factor in the market that I think is making investors where e is the coronavirus and this is closely related to the economy. The economy is already starting to transition to this new world, we have where we work from home.
There's a lot of companies that are more like cloud-related and tech-related that are doing really well. But overall, the economy can't completely recover. If the coronavirus cases are surging at just will never happen. We cannot get back to full productivity with this spike in cases and the cases Going up drastically. We had recent reports of 131,000 cases. That's incredible. That is a huge amount of coronavirus cases in one day.
So even though I think we got over one hurdle, which is the elections and I think that the economy overall is improving. We have another major hurdle to get over. If I put these on the Whiteboard we can see what I think are the negative factors and the positive Catalyst, the negative factors are anything that create uncertainty that create doubt with investors or anxiety and reasons that people keep their
money out of the market. This is the time typically, when you actually want to invest because when times are uncertain, when there's lots of negative factors, that's when the prices are the most depressed on different companies and different Holdings that you might be able to buy. This is typically when you get the best deals right now. We have a number of things that are causing negative factors.
We just went over a couple of them, but we also have things that I think will be positive Catalyst. A positive catalyst is anything that will move the market higher, it'll create a more certain environment. It'll make it easier for people to want to buy stocks because they'll feel more comfortable doing it under - Actors we had the elections. We talked about that the elections for the most part are over. So, that is one uncertain event that people had a lot of anxiety
about, it's mostly over. Now, on the positive side. We have a split government, and we have the uncertainty of the elections being over. This is conditional on. Republicans remaining control of the Senate, but I think, even if they don't remain control the Senate, I still think just the fact that the elections are over in the anxiety involved with it, is a positive Catalyst, another negative factor. We have is the economy. It's been heavily damaged.
There's businesses that are readjusting to The New Normal. We have the positive Catalyst. We were not able to pass an economic stimulus with the elections. I think that that was a direct result of the elections. It makes it harder to negotiate. It makes it harder to come to a deal when you have such an important thing coming up with a timeline. My prediction is that it will now be easier to come to an agreement on the economic
stimulus. If it doesn't happen, until the end of this year, I think it will happen early. And next. With a bite and presidency. So we might not see as big of an economic stimulus. As we normally would have, if the Republicans remain control over the Senate, but I think we'll still see an economic
stimulus. And that of course, is a huge positive Catalyst for the markets people are needing money right now when the federal government passes this and disperses that money that obviously has a huge effect on the markets, and again, the third negative factor. And I think the biggest one that remains is the coronavirus. This is obviously heavily combined with the economy. Like I said, they're kind of interlinked at this point, but the coronavirus is a temporary thing.
We will come up with vaccines. We will come up with treatments are medical professionals have already done. A good job in reducing The lethality of the coronavirus. We're understanding it better. We're treating it better. The death rates are going down and the vaccine I think will be another huge factor in fighting this virus. This is another positive catalyst. So when I look at these side by side, I see the elections being over and the result of that on the stock market.
Just getting that. Over and it's up 7%. I see economic damage that I think is temporary. We're going to have new stimulus has in the future. People are going to find an adapt to new ways of being employed, new ways of doing jobs. They're going to work from home and I think, overall, the economy will recover and then we have the coronavirus, which again I think is a temporary thing will come out with better therapies and vaccines to be able to fight it in the future.
All of these negative factors are temporary, the positive Catalyst will happen and I do not believe the market has fully priced. These positive Catalyst. I think that people that invest right now and buy companies right now with these factors still existing will be rewarded for it in the future. So in my opinion overall, I
¶ Portfolio overview
think that we're still in the early stages of a bull run. I think that as uncertainties get removed over time, the market will continue to move forward and upwards. Now I could be wrong. This is just speculation. There's a chance we could have another unknown drastic thing happen. That brings a market down, but I'm going to stay invested regardless. I think that there's more upside. Had been downside. And I've never been someone that
tries to time the market. So my goal is to buy the best companies that I think are situated for this future. Now, let's go ahead and go through some of my portfolio. I have 30 different Holdings. I plan on going through every one of them. Let's first of all, take a look at the performance. It's a value of 130 thousand dollars. Now, I have fourteen thousand dollars in gains of that a significant amount has happened from dividends five thousand dollars.
So even though this portfolio, went through the March lows. We lost like sixteen thousand dollars because we are invested in a lot of Real Estate. State. We bounce back, pretty strong in the past week. I've made eight thousand dollars in gains. So that's a pretty good week to have. So let me go through each category, one by one.
We'll go through each sector. I'll give you my opinion on it moving forward and if I think that this category strong and if I think the companies within it are strong. First of all, let's take a look at tech. Tech is my biggest category by far. I have 44 thousand, eight hundred dollars in it. I've made seven thousand dollar gains.
I've been building this category up, steadily over the past few months, one of the realizations that Made sense 2020 is that the coronavirus and the changes that are happening to our economy and to our culture, that work from home, the changes with technology and being more reliant on technology to communicate. I think that those Trends are around to stay. I think that we might see some reversion back to normalcy when the coronavirus gets dealt with.
But a lot of these companies that have succeeded in Tech, I think will continue to succeed even in a post coronavirus world. So I've moved more to these companies because I think we're going to have even further Reliance on them in the future. ER my biggest Holdings Apple a my opinion Apple has it all. It offers, fantastic products to everybody likes. It's doing a heavy push in the software content Creation Entertainment, music movies,
Fitness software. They're going into everything with software and subscriptions while maintaining their vertically integrated line of devices. Apple, I think is one of the best Holdings to have. And as we move to this work from home and communicate from home and educate your kids with technology, all these type of changes that are happening. I think that people become more reliant on Apple devices, and they'll actually spend more and more time on them. Another holding.
I've introduced to my portfolio is igv. This is a text software, ETF it gathers together, a lot of tech software companies in the u.s. Puts it into an ETF and then you get broad exposure to them. I wanted to include this in my tech pie to broaden my exposure outside, just a couple of companies. So I have some money in the CTF, it pays about the same dividend that MasterCard and Visa does. So it's a low dividend, but these companies grow their
dividends. Lee, all these Holdings in my tech pie, I feel very confident of. I think they're fantastic Holdings to have and I think they're going to do really well in the future. So I don't plan on making any changes with these companies. Next up we have consumer. This is my second largest category in my portfolio. Have a total of twenty four thousand seven hundred dollars in it. The games right now are about thirty-six hundred dollars. Disney is one. That's my biggest holding in
this category. I think that Disney plus will be an enormous success. That's what I'm counting on right now. This company obviously has a lot of struggles. It. A lot of issues that spacing, but as we went over previously, I think that most of the issues it's facing are temporary. And the Disney plus streaming service is not temporary. That's not going away. I think they're going to gain a tremendous amount of subscribers very quickly.
There's a chance of my mind that they could catch up the Netflix very quickly. They play their cards, right? So Disneys one that I'm happy to bet on it. Another one of my top Holdings is Costco. This is one of my all-time favorite companies in general. I think it's one that it does most things, right? It treats his employees, right? It treats its customers. Murs, right? And it treats its shareholders, very well. It does all of that. At the same time, not many companies can pull that off.
So, Costco is one of my favorite Holdings. It always seems to trade at a premium. So you're paying up big money when you're buying Costco, you're buying it at a very high P/E ratio more expensive than some of these tech companies, but that's the price you pay for a business model like Costco. So despite the price. I've been continuing to build up my Holdings in Costco. If this company comes down and price, I'm not going to complain. I'm going to buy more of the
stock. Pepsi's one, that's a good company. It doesn't seem to have a tremendous amount of growth, the revenues, pretty flat on it, but it's a steady dividend payer. I think it will continue to give very conservative returns. Pepsi's never going to be a company that I think gives you multiples of your money. So this is not one that I would put, as a major holding unless you're wanting a very conservative company.
Home, Depot and Target. Our two companies that I think are Amazon proof, their companies that I think will continue to have success. Comcast is a company that I always like owning because of their media properties, they own Which owns CNBC they come out with a really good television series. They recently launched peacock, which I think is going to do really. Well. It has kind of a freemium model. So this is a company that's kind of Telecom Media Company.
It's not going to give you the biggest returns, but I see this is another very reliable steady dividend payer, that will give you a conservative returns. And then Nikes one that I've never put a lot of money in, but this company has impressed me with their ability to go from Amazon, take all of their products off Amazon and still be successful. I'm going to be building up my holding in Nike as well. All of these companies in consumer.
I'm going to continue to add to. I like all of them and I think they're very solid companies going into the future. Next up. We have real estate. This has been the most unfortunate part of my portfolio. This is dragged down. The returns. Real estate was not good to own going into 2020 some residential. Real estate has still been good like owning your house.
It's probably gone up in value, but in most cases, if you owned any type of commercial real estate, it has not done well in 2020, you See overall that I have nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars total value in this and I'm down two thousand dollars and even over the past week, the market went up like six or seven percent just in the past five days, real estate was only up three point eight percent. So even with the recovery, real estate continues to be a laggard
continues to underperform. There's not much momentum with it. There's not many positive catalysts. It's just something that's been a continual struggle. So this is the category that I'm considering making some changes. I have four companies. He's in real estate, two of which I think are strong companies and two of, which I think are mostly week companies, Simon Property, which is a shopping mall company is by far. The weakest company in my portfolio.
I've gone through and tried to filter out my companies to the strongest ones remaining and I think that Simon properties, the very weakest, it same all Reet in 2020. A lot of people are not going to malls anymore. Most of them, all's, I see that are very busy are usually filled up with restaurants. Those are the things everybody wants to rent to but Property can't fill their entire mall with restaurants. They need to have shopping outlets and it seems difficult to keep those in business,
especially in this environment. This is a holding that I've held since the beginning of my portfolio. I'm currently down Seventeen, hundred dollars on it. That's over half of my initial investment. And this is one that I'm heavily considering selling. I know, I'll only get eighteen hundred dollars out of the sale, but I think I might be able to take that capital and put it into other companies that can grow that amount of money faster than Simon Property. This is a company that I think
will continue to have struggles. For a very long time. It'll take a long time for investors to get back on board with this company. I've also not been impressed with the management. They haven't been transparent. They've been very opaque. Most investors. Don't know what's going on. We have other companies like store Capital, where the management is extremely transparent and showing you what they're doing.
So there's a lot of characteristics that I've been unimpressed with Simon Property. It's a company that I don't see how it fits with the new normal that. Well. I think it's going to take significant adjustments from their Is and that might take years to do. So, this is one that I might exit out of take the money. I have and put it in another opportunity. I think will grow this money faster. Well, Towers another one that
I'm considering selling. This is a healthcare read and this is another company that I think has very limited growth. It has a lot of struggles ahead of it. These are two companies that the combined sale would provide some Capital be able to build up another investment and a really good dividend-paying companies. So I've been considering selling both of these companies. Next up, we have health care.
This is my fourth biggest A sector I have about twelve thousand dollars in it. This is a category that's done. Okay, I'm up 1,600 dollars in it. I've made some decent returns. I only have two Holdings as of now. I've sold out of some companies and I know there's going to be a lot of people that say Joseph, you sold out of Johnson & Johnson, and Merck and Pfizer and all these different Healthcare companies. Why would you sell those great companies?
That is true. I sold out of some of my individual Holdings in healthcare. I did that for a specific reason. All the Holdings that I sought out of. In healthcare, I put into a Vanguard Healthcare Index Fund. The top Holdings in this fund, RJ, and Jay, and Pfizer, and Merc. They're all the same Holdings. The reason I move them from Individual Holdings. Into a healthcare Index Fund is because I've been deciding that I want to focus on companies. I know the most about and
Healthcare companies. I don't know as much about as other categories. I feel like I can learn the consumers. Better. I feel like I can learn the technology companies better. The health care ones like Pfizer and J and J are mostly out of my scope of competence. So even though I made money on all of those sales and I made a profit, I decided to exit out of them and put that money in an ETF where I don't have to worry
about controlling them. The only one that I've continued to hold individually as a be because this is the only health care company that I really believed was undervalued at the time. So I didn't want to sell it when it's undervalued. I think there's a story to play out with that V and I think it will gain value over time. So right now my Healthcare pie is very simple. It's mostly in a Vanguard Healthcare Index Fund. All Top Holdings of this are mostly the Holdings I had.
And then we have extra exposure to a v, which I think is a stock that's undervalued right now. In the finance category. I have eleven thousand five hundred dollars and I've done something similar. I sold out of a few companies that I didn't really have a strong conviction on. And I put that money into an index fund and then I put more money into the companies that I have a strong conviction on.
That's JP Morgan and tiro price. These are I think the two best picks in the financial realm outside of just your fintechs like PayPal and square. Those Don't really fit with the strategy. I'm doing in this portfolio. But JP Morgan is a pretty big divot. A it's a diversified Bank. They're competing in fintech with square. They have a lot of things going for him. I think as the economy recovers that this holding will do really well and tiro price is one
that's always done. Well, they're not really a bank, their financial institution that helps people with their Investments. And so I think this one's going to do well in the future regardless of the economy and then Vanguard Financial Index, Fund vfh. Is a new ETF where I put all the money from those other Banks being sold, so it gets me too. Certified with a lot of other financial institutions and it also pays a quarterly dividend and utilities. I have seven thousand six.
Hundred dollars invested. It's mostly spread across these four companies Dominion energy. Nextera energy, The Southern Company and Duke Energy. All of these I plan on holding. I think they're all very strong companies out of the four. I think that next era is probably the best bet. It's the one that's moving most heavily into renewable energy. So I like this company a lot but I like all these Holdings. I don't plan on selling any of them. I introduced a Vanguard. T Index Fund.
I might throw some money in this to give me exposure to smaller utility companies outside of these big for. But most of the money that I put into utilities, will continue to go into these four companies. And then in Telecom, I'm also in the red that's entirely from AT&T. So the total value, seven thousand two hundred dollars. I only hold two companies and Telecom AT&T and Verizon Verizon. I'm in the green by $230 ATM
down $743. So AT&T has been a company that investors continually sell out of? It's reached a Your low recently and there's not a lot of positive factors with this company. I don't plan on selling it right now, even though it is one of the weaker Holdings because it has consistent cash flow. It provides a really Hefty dividend. It's at a very low valuation right now. So I'll continue to hold it but I don't plan on adding to it
aggressively. I'll just get the dividends from this company and invested into other Holdings and Industrials. We only have twenty three hundred dollars and it's invested into of the most boring companies, Union Pacific, which is a railroad company and then Waste Management, which is a garbage company. It's not a bad company. I'm not saying that as a negative term. I'm saying, it's literally a garbage company. Both of these are solid companies. I don't plan on making any changes to them.
So that's it. That's the portfolio. So far. If you want to see the exact allocation of everything. There's a link in the description. You just click on that and it opens up my current location. Now another thing we can look at with my portfolio is my income growth over time. This graph shows month over month how much I've been paid in dividends. So it's very basic. I just add up how much I was paid. Dividends for that month and then it's plotted out here.
This is since the beginning of my portfolio in January of 2018, and you can see that it has its up and downs over time. There's some ones that are pretty high some that are low, but overall it continues to Trend in the same direction. Over the past few months. It's been a little bit chaotic. I've had some lower months, but that's mostly because I've been changing around my Holdings. The payout schedules different on different Holdings, but I expect this to continue to go up. Over time.
I think going into the closing of this year. We'll have months over $350. Here's another graph. We can look at is this one? This is the year-over-year growth, the pink bars represent 2018, and then the blue bars are 2019. Then of course the yellow bars are 2020, so you can see the growth over time in October of 2018. I earned fifty two dollars in dividends. In October of 2019. I earned $184 and then in October of 2020, iron $265.
If you plotted this out, as Revenue, growth for a company, this would be impressive. The company would be growing, its Revenue very quickly. So I like seeing the same. Can happen with my finances. I'm hoping that I continue to beat these every single year and grow this Revenue stream of dividends in my portfolio. And this website with all these graphs, of course are available if you join the patreon, so if you want to try that out again, there's a link in the
description. Okay, let's move on and get some
¶ My thoughts on Apple and the right to repair
questions. Joseph at Joseph Carlson show.com is an email address. That's Joseph at Joseph Carlson show.com., The first ones from Jensen. He says, hi Joseph, quick question. I wanted to get your thoughts on Apple. Being a main proponent of removing our right to repair the devices. They Sell to us. The customers, just seeing all of their tactics of making their customers have to buy an entirely new device rather than perform simple fixes for cheaper than quoted doesn't sit.
Well, with me. I've seen people turn away from using Apple products for this reason. It was wondering if you see this as a threat to the overall, health of the company. Keep up the good work. Yeah. I've seen this as a main complaint with apple, the right to repair, Apple makes it difficult to repair their devices or replace. Their Says Android for instance, is much more open to lots of different people repairing their devices. I think this comes from a different standpoint of Apple.
I don't think this is about making money, so much as ensuring the user experience. So, Apple does everything. They can everything in their power to have a vertically, integrated experience where they control everything from their end, to the users end. They want to control everything because if another company controls any part of the experience, it can be in fear. Barrier and it can reflect poorly on. Apple's brand. I can give the example of the Apple wireless router.
Apple used to sell wireless routers and they discontinued it. Even though I thought they worked pretty good. I had one myself for a while.
It worked out fine for router, but Apple cut off that product and I think the reason why, in my opinion, they haven't confirm this, but I speculate that the reason why was because Apple couldn't control the entire user experience since the wireless router was reliant on. Internet service provider, many times people's internet would be poor or it would perform poor because of Comcast or a different internet service provider and people would attribute that to Apple.
They'd say my Apple wireless router doesn't work. Well, I'm not getting good internet. An apple doesn't have the way of saying that's actually not our router. That's your internet service provider. So because of other companies, I think the apple is getting their name hurt. There are getting their brand hurt by internet service providers. So they said rather than damaging our brand we're just not going to To offer this line of products, unless we can control the internet as well.
We don't want to faulty internet service. Provider to reflect poorly on our brand. So Apple does that all the time. They want to control everything, beginning to end. You look at repairing a device and a lot of these third-party repair groups. They do a very sloppy job and repairing a lot of the iPhone screens. You can get aftermarket are not nearly as good as the Apple screen. So if you go and you pay somebody a cheaper amount to repair your screen, they in, Dollar screen, that's not as
good. It doesn't have all the same features as the original Apple screen. It doesn't have the same quality and you're using your phone and it's a little bit more laggy. The screen doesn't work quite as well. You might attribute that to Apple, that might hurt their branding, because of this third-party repair. You might think the repair went fine, but this is just kind of how I phones work.
So, I think apple is obsessed about making sure that they control the entire user experience that they don't have third parties doing. There's that aren't up to their standards and having that reflect poorly on their brand. They'd rather say if you want to repair our devices, you need to be certified by us to be able to repair them so that they're up to our quality. So it doesn't reflect poorly on our brand. And I think the big debate here is whether they have the right to do that.
I don't think that they can prevent people from going in and repairing the devices, but I think they're trying to say if you're going to go and get your devices repaired by some third party, that's not approved by us. That doesn't have our standards, and they do a really bad job at it. They screw up the device even more. We're not going to warranty that they go on and damage the device even more than what it was. We don't want to stand by that products. I think that's apples. Argument.
Obviously, there's huge debates going on with this. It's actually very hot topic debated with apple, but I can see where apples coming from. They want to have every single device up to their standard because they are obsessive about user experience. It's part of the reason they want to control every single app that gets on the App Store, you have so many quality. Roll measures of that and I think it's the same thing with repairs.
They want everybody to have their device repaired up to their standards, where the rights come in and what people can do, and how Apple weren't easiest products is Up For Debate, but I can see where they're coming from M says howdy
¶ Buying companies on a discount
Joseph. I've been pretty hungry on learning more about investing strategies, and terms lately. One such strategy is quote, Buy Low and sell High / hold while em, I think that's, that's generally the basis of investing. But anyway, you say so I thought. Well, when is At its lowest when the market drops, I've read terms like stocks on sale or discounted. Is there a way to tell or alert you? When they do? There's lots of questions in that. I know. And of course thank you for the
content. It really changed the way I focus on my finances. Well, I'm glad I could put more of a focus on finances. Like I said, these current events that go on, they change all the time, but if you put emphasis on your finances, I think it has a much longer lasting positive impact on your your life.
So, to answer your question. Question trying to find companies on sale and by good companies at specific times I think is mostly a losing game and I say that as somebody that I consider myself a person that tries to find Value in companies. I want to buy them at good times. I don't want to overpay for them. But when I look at history, it's very difficult to try to buy good companies during a discounted time. It's very difficult to do. If you're looking for bottom Barrel deal.
On companies, a lot of times. I think you end up with companies that are value traps. There's a reason that companies trade at very low P/E, ratios, by the rest of the market is trading at high P/E ratios. If you just focused on companies that are ultra low P/E ratios or price to sail or whatever, valuation metric, you want to look at, you end up with companies like Simon Property and AT&T. Those are both value buys right now.
Those are both low valued companies but assignment property in AT&T been good Investments. No, they haven't. Not been great Investments for a number of years. So when I look at it, you can't look at just these type of metrics to see what's a good value. You also have to incorporate the future of the economy, the future direction, that people behave and people consume content consume products. The way that they transfer money.
Look at the way that Commerce is going in general, and try to look at the companies that are going to be able to take advantage of that. The most, a lot of these ones are already priced, really high there. A lot of tech companies there a lot of Creation companies.
They're the ones that people are putting their money in the most, but these companies, even though they might not fit with being on sale or being discounted, if they're going to grow for another 10 years buying them right now is probably not a bad deal. So I would focus Less on trying to get alerts when a company enters a specific PE ratio. If a company is under a 15 P/E ratio that does not mean it's a good Buy in and of itself that does not mean it's a steal.
There's a reason investors are discounting it. So, instead of focusing. Focusing on that. Look at the companies that you think will be the winners over the next 10 years. I say just dollar cost average into the company's. You think will be the winners.
¶ How many holdings should you have?
The next one is from Anonymous, living in Hong Kong. He says, I wanted to email you and say thank you for all the wonderful content you put on your videos. I've learned so much about investing from you. Thanks to you. I finally have the confidence to invest in April, was able to get some really great companies at Great Value. I now have 35 companies in my
portfolio. My question to you is, do you think having 35 companies is too many What do you recommend is a good number to have in a portfolio? I'm going to keep adding to my portfolio whenever I can. This is something that I've adapted my portfolio when I started off two years ago. I was very excited to buy every company that I really liked. And I had like 60 companies to start with not the best strategy, my opinion.
Now, since then, I've continually trimmed my positions and focused on higher conviction bets and I think that that's what people should generally be doing out of your Or 35 companies. There's probably a good amount of them that you really don't understand the businesses all that. Well, not most people have the ability to understand 35 different businesses and different categories on an in-depth level. But out of those are probably ones that you really do.
Have a good grasp on your much more comfortable and looking at the business and how it's doing, and it's easier for you to do analysis on it. So, what I would do is I would keep the companies that you feel the most comfortable investing in the ones, you have the highest level of knowledge on Would keep those as individual Holdings and then I would introduce ETFs to give you exposure to the sectors that you don't have as much knowledge over.
That's exactly what I've been doing with my portfolio. In the healthcare sector. I realized that I want to have exposure to it. I think these companies are really good companies. They're going to be around for the long term. Everybody needs health care and pharmaceuticals, but I just don't understand the industry that well, I don't understand clinical trials and how they go
through and do all this stuff. So, I thought I need to follow Peter Lynch's advice and invest in what I know and I really don't know healthcare companies that well, so even though I don't know him well, but I still want exposure. There's a way that you can accomplish both of those things ETS. If you want to invest where you don't know something. Well, but you want exposure, use an ETF, if you have a good knowledge or good competency of
a certain sector. I feel like I'm much more knowledgeable about tech, then you can start picking out individual companies that you want to give a higher conviction, bet on and that you want to give More exposure to. So that's kind of the route that I've been taking where if it's outside of my circle of competence.
If I don't feel like I can really grasp the company's, then I'm going to do that through ETFs if their companies that I really feel like I know in-depth, I'm going to do that with individual Holdings in general. I think 35 is about the max amount of Holdings. You should have for an individual investor. I think the sweet spot is around 20 to 30. I think that's a really good portfolio. I don't think it's good to have. Two or three Holdings of
individual companies. Some people feel like they have to have that concentrated of a portfolio. That might be good. If you're working with a small amount of money and you really want to do some big bets. But for bigger portfolios, I think it's better to have a little bit more Diversified. So around 20 to 25 Holdings, I think is probably a good place for most people.
¶ What app am I using?
Robert says, what program do you use to look at your portfolio? Great show. I am using Charles Schwab app on my phone right now. I'm a new investor here. Loving the information for the long term. Thank you for your time. Well, Robert, I appreciate the compliments on the channel. I'm using a broker called M1 Finance. There's a link in the description of this video to their website, but it's one of these newer Brokers that can do some pretty cool things.
So they're building out a lot of different features as well. They have a checking account. They have automated Investments. Now, that's something I've been setting up in my portfolio so that I have money that flows into a checking account and then it overflows into my investments. It's pretty cool. Some of the stuff they're doing, so it's a smaller company, it's not As big as Vanguard or Schwab by any means, but it's one of these newer fintech brokerages
that I really like. Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and leave it there. I appreciate everybody for tuning in. I had a lot of episodes I wanted to do this week, but it just didn't feel right to come out with these non related to politics episodes, right? When we're having a huge general elections. It just didn't feel like the right time. So I have a lot of content that will be coming out with this next week that I think will be
fun to discuss. So if you want to see that, hit the Subscribe button and the little notification that always helps out. Channel as well as keep in mind that we're on Spotify and apple podcasts and Google podcast. So so go subscribe there as well. And you get this in audio format. Otherwise, I will see you guys next time.
