Phantasmix Stock Market Blog

politician, noun
1: a leader engaged in civil administration
2: a person active in party politics
3: a schemer who tries to gain advantage in an organization in sly or underhanded ways

This third definition is usually omitted from modern dictionaries. Older ones would sometimes say “see also liar“.

I’m late to the party with my recession talk, because if you believe the news “there’s no recession” and we’re back in the bull market:

Image © waɪ.tiː

But, here it goes anyway. A typical recession-proof portfolio consists of:

• large-cap companies with stable growth and solid dividend
  ha, banks were supposed to be like that
• consumer staples stocks (food, alcohol, tobacco, household and personal care essentials)
  frankly, alcohol is so expensive in Canada, in case of a recession it would be the first to go for us
• healthcare
  this should be in the above category among “consumer staples”, because that’s what Valium and Viagra are by now; but seriously, Healthcare REITs might be a smart move
• bank deposits (cash)
  not too much, if inflation is running high and interest rates are low
• foreign investments
  you’d have to rely on analyst opinions with these, and that’s just not a good strategy; however I don’t mind Switzerland and their money

We have a saying “the greedy pay twice”. The cheapest most definitely isn’t always the smartest or the most frugal thing to do. Yes! sometimes it’s more frugal to pay more.

The economic benefit of paying as little as possible to save money is lost if you have to pay the second time to fix the result.

A couple of anecdotes:

• Last year I dyed my hair at home, and had to pay the hair dresser to have the color fixed. Color corrections cost more than a simple dye job. Have I learned the lesson? You bet.
• We bought a fairly expensive item ($1,300) last year from a small store. The owner gave us a discount, but his return policy is “no returns”. The item turned out to be not what we wanted and we ended up having to re-sell it on Ebay, taking a monetary hit, of course. In the end we lost more than we saved, not to mention all the time and worry of selling on Ebay.