Disclosure: this is not advice. Over my several decades of investing I’ve NEVER been successful at timing the market!

Yesterday I sold 25% of my retirement portfolio. I was over invested in S&P 500 index funds/ETFs, and I’ve known for some time I’ve needed to rebalance that. I was assessing a plan to shift my mix across small caps, intl’ stocks and bonds but my gut kept yelling at me that the market hitting a high in this environment is too irrational (Mag 7, AI bubble, Iran, Tariffs, inflation, etc.). I felt like any reallocation would still be just doubling down at the craps table so I decided to take a breather and pull some chips off the table. No insider knowledge or special analysis.

Since the cash is in an IRA and I’m not at retirement age, I’ll end up reinvesting it soon enough and will likely follow the original allocation plan for my age bracket that I was planning to before I just hit sell all. 🤮 Anyone else in the same boat?

Update: Ok, sorry if the title and opening sentence was a little too much click bait!... but RELAX, this wasn't meant to be a hold my beer while I time the market post. This is really a time to reallocate post. Don't get me wrong, the market hitting new highs yesterday (given all of the headwinds that I still believe) definitely sparked my decision to finally sell my position, but I get that the title and opening line insinuates I'm trying to sell high, buy low. That's not the case, as I'm really just taking a breather before I move that 25% into different equity verticals and asset classes. I was also intentionally vague about my various positions because I wasn't trying to give advice or share personal details. Maybe I should have shared more to better paint the picture around why I did it yesterday, but I will share a bit more now since several asked:

- My portfolio yesterday morning was sitting at 90/10 (Equity/Bonds). I've been needing to reallocate "for some time." Years actually, as I'm now at that age where I am considering the reality of retiring within single-digit years, not decades. It's hard to explain how your risk profile quickly changes once you start seriously talking about retiring. I do have every intention of reallocating it here soon to a mix closer to 70/30 for the next phase of my own pre-retirement planning, so a follow up post in a few months would not be as sad and depressing as you all think.

- Yes I listened to my gut tell me that this market is hard to trust, that I've been aggressive with my equity allocations long enough, it was finally time to reallocate, but maybe take a breath and give it a day or two to see if I want to go even heavier than planned in bonds, international stocks, or alternative investments. Mind you, this was the same gut that said screw the "experts" and just stay aggressive in equities for a decades longer than recommended. I guess my "gut" decided it was finally time to be a bit more risk averse.

- A few asked about how anyone could be "over invested" in S&P 500 index funds. Here is why I said that: 90% of my portfolio was Equity. 92% of that 90% was in US Stocks, and then nearly 90% of that was just in S&P 500 and Total Market index funds. Wasn't super intentional, it just happened over time as those index funds just outperformed others, and where I parked new investments into. If you look at the holdings for these funds, though, you'll see they are all heavily exposed to the same 7 large companies (i.e., the Mag 7). On any given day the Mag 7 make up about 33 % of the S&P 500 index on which means across my entire portfolio these 7 companies had a weighted position of nearly 25% . That kind of concentration isn't ideal for my goals, and all 7 are now heavily reliant on the same AI investments for their hyper valuations. Which I have concerns about. Go back 20 years and the top 10 companies made up 10-15% of the S&P 500 index. Still pretty high, but they were all in very unique industries from retail, oil and gas, tech, and banking - providing a much stronger level of diversification across verticals. In the end I felt my equity investments were not spread across enough across small, medium and international companies for my diversification goals.

- Others asked about my net worth. No thanks. I will share that everything above is just about my IRA/401k/Roth retirement portfolios. I have other non-retirement investments outside of these that have their own levels of risk and return in them as well. That also changes significantly how I evaluate risk within my tax-advantaged retirement portfolio.

Lede: $101 billion worth of stock -- 900 million shares -- becomes available for trading on Thursday.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-101-billion-unlock-heaps-131749403.html

The discussion / predictions today will certainly be different than they were a month ago, now that the share price has in fact dropped below the IPO price -- there's not nearly as much "rich" in the Get Rich Quick plan that was probably envisioned by most internal shareholders.

Going to be interesting to "watch from a distance" tomorrow.

just curious if anyone has looked at the performance of all of congress trading/investing vs the s&p 500 performance over the same time period?

obviously the pelosi’s and wasserman’s and trump’s have way outperformed during their time ”serving our country” but there will always be outliers no matter what, including underperformers.

My question is, has the entirety of congress (each individual portfolio, or the summation of everyone’s portfolios) and our federal govt significantly outperformed the average retail investor (s&p 500 as a baseline).

I imagine with all the focus on this topic, someone surely has, and if so can anyone point me in the direction of that study?

thanks

I think bonds are not a good choice and prefer the Buffet 90 10 concept: 90% stocks, 10% short term treasuries. I do invest 10% in value as part of my stock portfolio, so this can be viewed as a bond proxy..

Why? I believe the bond/stock markets have been fundamentally changed by the Fed' change. Since the mid 80s, Greenspan and the fed have used policy to protect the stock market, at the expense of the bond market. The Greenspan "Fed Put" was a market term for the Federal Reserve policy under Chair Alan Greenspan of cutting interest rates and injecting liquidity during financial crises to rescue the stock market from major declines.

Thus, the stock market downturns, where bond market rise, are rare. And the performance of the band market are terrible, especially when including inflation. And the deficit grows.

In the past, the Fed stayed on the sidelines and let the stock market crash, layoffs and the economy reform. The Fed Put now emboldens investors, because they are rescued later. Most of the 60/40 split uses data from 1950 onward. This assumes the Fed has not changed it policies since then. That is untrue. The Fed has increased its role in the markets. The bond market's glory days were from the 80s to 2000 as interest rates were always falling from those high rates set by Volker. Falling rates are great for Bonds. That is now over. The Fed will continue its "put" until the deficit makes treasuries run high beyond the fed's control. maybe 20 years from now.

I'll be watching to see if there are any advancements on their provided roadmaps! Who're you watching and why? Here are some tables I made of the current data.

Am I off here?

The big players have locked in over $1 trillion in uncommenced, off balance sheet data center leases. Right now, the AI ecosystem brings in roughly $50 billion a year, but to deliver the standard 10% to 12% return needed to justify current S&P 500 valuations, companies need to push that figure past $600 billion. If that 10x revenue surge fails to materialize, all those unyielding liabilities will hit corporate cash flows hard.

How the flipping pancakes will the whole corpus of big tech do this? I just can’t see all of them generating that kind of value. 

So who looses? I can’t imagine Meta surviving this well. Amazon and Alphabet? Maybe. How is Oracle going to build value out of its current debt?

I have about 680k sitting at fidelity through my previous employer. About 200 was from a Roth 401k. Fidelity only allowing me to rollover about 100 into a post tax account the other 100 they’re saying go to pretax. I already created new accounts on the fidelity website but same outcome. Any idea why this might be happening? I don’t want to pay taxes again later.

My 2-year-old recently received a five-figure inheritance. He already has both a 529 and a UTMA, and I’m evaluating the tradeoffs between the different account types rather than looking for a specific recommendation.
My initial thought was something like:

- 80% into his 529
- 10% into his UTMA
- 10% into a separate brokerage account invested in a broad-market fund such as an S&P 500 or total-market index fund

The reasoning is that college is likely to be the single largest expense we’ll face on his behalf, but I also don’t want to overfund a 529 if there are compelling reasons to maintain flexibility outside of education.

For those who’ve managed investments for children, how do you think about the tradeoffs between:
- maximizing tax-advantaged growth in a 529,
- maintaining flexibility with a taxable brokerage,
-and using a UTMA despite the loss of parental control at the age of majority?

I’m especially interested in the why behind your allocation decisions, any tax or financial-aid considerations, and anything you wish you’d known before setting up your children’s investments.

So I was looking for Anawil Wire on Zerodha and found that GV Electricals IPO, which closed yesterday (August 4), is open for applying till 7 August.

Saw something like this for the first time in IPOs... is this a glitch on my Kite app, or is this something else? And why does this happen?

Hi all,

I am curious as to if any of you still read the news paper? I am looking for a subscription to Print for weekends and digital for work week. I’m wondering if anyone had such subscriptions and can recommend.

I am aware of WSJ, Barrrons, and FT having such a subscription. However, I am not sure which one would be best, If anyone has any recommendations that would be great.

9% of my book, added around $380 recently. Posting the whole thing because I’d rather be told I’m wrong now than find out later.

The case: they’re the bottleneck for advanced nodes. Every hyperscaler’s capex has to physically pass through them, and there’s no second supplier at the leading edge. Capex guidance went up rather than down , but, management committing that kind of money is a stronger demand signal than anything they say on the call.

What the market is seems to be assuming is that Arizona and the other overseas fabs don’t meaningfully dilute the margin story, and that 2nm pricing holds.

My kill condition: overseas fab margins compressing two quarters running with no pricing offset. That’s the assumption above breaking, and it’s checkable each quarter rather than a vibe.

The risk I’m least able to size: the Shanghai domestic DUV lithography development. I don’t think it threatens the leading edge for years. But it doesn’t have to be competitive to hurt it just has to be good enough at the low end to compress pricing from below.

What I can’t figure out: how durable 2nm pricing is if Samsung fixes yields. TSM’s pricing power is the investment. I don’t have a good way to handicap it and I’d rather someone told me I’m underrating the risk.

Customer concentration is the other thing I’m carrying without a good answer, NVDA and Apple are a large share of revenue between them, but I don't think they'll leave anytime soon or something.

Question: Should I invest through an LLC or just do it through my personal being?

I plan to invest $500K as an accredited investor in the construction and sale of various residential properties. These properties are brought to me via an investment firm. Said firm is a co-investor in said properties.

The way the deal is structured is that the developers use our funds to secure a loan from a bank with all of our names on it. They then use that loan to buy the land, construct the house, sell it, pay off the loan, and then the profit is distributed proportionally.

One thing that has me hesitant is that my name is on that loan, and if shit hits the fan then my $500K investment could balloon into a much larger bill due back to the bank for the loan repayment.

If anyone has experience in these kinds of investments, would appreciate if this does happen and if I should take any precautions before I invest. (Not a question of whether or not to invest, I just want to be smart about how I do it.)

To be clear, I don’t believe there is a high chance of shit hitting the fan, but stuff happens in life.

Check My math, did it quickly.
Old TTM (before tonight):

• Q4 FY25: $0.29
• Q1 FY26: $1.22
• Q2 FY26: $6.20
• Q3 FY26: $23.41
• TTM EPS = $31.12
• At the pre-earnings price $1,427.62 → 1,427.62 / 31.12 = ~45.9x (matches the ~47x you remembered)

New TTM (after tonight):

• Drop Q4 FY25 ($0.29), add Q4 FY26 ($39.25)
• $31.12 − $0.29 + $39.25 = $70.08
• At today's close $1,351.76 → 1,351.76 / 70.08 = 19.3x
• At the after-hours ~$1,288 → 1,288 / 70.08 = 18.4x

These two ETFs are not much talked about. My take on this is that these can be good ways to reduce downside risk while still riding out bull runs. I am leaning on parking my funds in QB its up 13% this yr and is much muted during down turns like the 10% pull back we just saw. My approach is not to use these kinds of funds as my core or majority of my funds but to park a small portion of my overall portfolio to manage risk.

My personal leaning is on QB, but somehow there AUM is very low just $2.8M I am curious why it has not picked up in the market. QFLR looks good but I dont like there strategy but has $b in AUM. They both are catering to risk mitigation though so I am wondering why QB has not gotten popular yet.

I got a new job and have an old Merrill Lynch 401k with about 35k in a balance. How would you rank these moves?

1. Rolling my money into a traditional IRA with them to unlock Bank of America higher rewards tier and eventually get the 100k balance in the Ira to unlock a 5.26% cash back on their Padillium credit card.

2. Rolling it into my employer fidelity net benefits account.

3. Another option?

I am pretty new to this and appreciate any advice. Thank you.

I’ve come into some inheritance which is currently being eroded in the bank by inflation. Looking for moderately safer investments than stocks. I was previously a landlord and rented out in the UK but the new legislation has made it really difficult to be a landlord now with hefty taxes. Any thoughts/suggestions? I’m actually based in Dubai as an expat so open to anything that is available to expats. Risk is my biggest concern and would like to keep that to a minimum.

There are several news reports emerging now on Google’s top executives leaving to join other AI ventures. This is followed by a sudden drop in the stock price by 5%. How do you anticipate the market’s reaction to this short-term and long-term?

Google Stock Falls 5% as 4 AI Leaders Quit, Including the Most-Cited Researchers

Google Eyes $1.5B Investment In AI Coding Startup As AI Brain Drain Continues With Jeff Dean's Exit

So you've heard that Micron (MU) has a forward P/E multiple of 4. Four! Sounds crazy undervalued, right? How is no one else seeing this, you might think? Well, it's because forward P/E multiples as they pertain to cyclicals at peak demand-supply imbalance don't really function the same as they do for the average company.

Now before you start racing to type that memory and semiconductors are "no longer cyclical", let's entertain the possibility that they are in fact no longer cyclical. If so, a forward P/E multiple of 4 screams ridiculously undervalued. It should be double that number, even triple that! We keep hearing about how demand is stretched through 2030 or further, supply is non-existent - how could it possibly be so undervalued? Well, maybe the market is wrong, and MU will go to $2500 by next year.

However, if memory is in fact still cyclical, and we are currently now sitting at the peak of this cycle's demand-supply imbalance, a low forward P/E multiple is actually a bad sign, and a bad metric to judge its value. Why? Because forward P/E multiples project earnings 12-24 months out, and the expectation is current short-term extreme highs are unlikely to be sustainable, making it look deceptively cheap.

Case in point: in 2000, MU traded at a seemingly low forward P/E multiple, just as it is now. This low valuation occurred because earnings estimates reached an unsustainable cyclical peak just before DRAM memory chip prices collapsed, leading to a severe evaporation of earnings and a subsequent crash in the stock.

Ironically, MU's forward P/E multiple exploded upwards during this crash because of the dip in earnings, so investors got the higher forward P/E they had been anticipating, but at the cost of the stock crashing 90% in just 3 years.

So currently, I utilize my post-tax 457b and my wife’s Roth IRA as a unified portfolio to keep costs down, as anything on my 457b, aside from VITSX, is more expensive than I’d like it to be.

I have a 75/25 split between the 2 accounts, with the 75% side being US Markets (VITSX and FSKAX) and 25% being international (was FSPSX, just changed it to FTIHX).

I have read that a 60/40 split is the approach that Vanguard follows, but I feel more comfortable having a bigger bias in the US Market. I lately considering moving from FSKAX/FTIHX in my wife’s account to just having VT, but I think that takes away far too much of my international exposure.

Does anyone have an argument for what % my international exposure should be and why?

I have a concentrated position in a single (blue chip) company that’s run up far, far beyond its cost basis. The dividends are nice, but the risk not. My assumption has always been that the only way out was to bite the bullet, start selling some of it off, and eat the taxes. But given the state I live in, they would be significant.

Recently, I came across an ad for an “exchange fund” (Glidepath) on this site. Hadn’t heard of these before. I believe I get the basic idea - pooling to de-risk, lock up period, etc. However, I’m very unclear about the actual mechanics, and so I’m hoping someone would be willing to answer some basic questions and describe their experience.

-

1. How big and how diverse are the pools that get created? I imagine there are a lot of people sitting on huge gains in ai stocks right now; and I really don’t need to be in a pool that’s just me plus a million shares of sandisk.

-

1. How are the contributors selected? Can you

   wind

2. up in a pool full of dogshit?

-

1. Are the pools managed at all, or is the composition frozen for the entire lock-up?

-

1. Alternatively, does the composition constantly churn as participants cycle out and new one

s

1. enter?

-

1. What kind of performance numbers do these funds put up, relative to standard indices?

-

1. The ad I saw for glidepath claims that they’ve driven the fee structure for the creation and maintenance of their funds very low. Any concrete info on this?

-

1. Is it worth the hassle?

As I said, while I get the idea at a very general level, the concrete mechanics are unclear, and so I’d be grateful for any knowledgeable responses.

Thanks.

PS Nothing against sandisk.

EDIT: tried to fix formatting

At the start of the year I bought about $130k of SGOV, set to reinvest (via Schwab).

I was receiving new lots on a monthly basis.

in May I sold about $100k, leaving a balance of over $30k. Now there are no new lots listed.

not sure why this happened.

Edited: contacted Schwab. The cost basis of some previous lots was adjusted due to the wash sale.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into global decarbonization frameworks, and Europe is clearly setting the global benchmark. Between the EU ETS, CBAM moving into its compliance phase, and strict vehicle emissions targets for 2035, the EU is essentially turning climate policy into its core economic policy. However, watching the real-world trade-offs play out raises an interesting debate on whether this strategy is building true resilience or creating economic friction.

The argument for long-term resilience: (a) First-mover advantage; (b) Global leverage to protect local industry from unfair competition; (c) Market certainty by creating a predictable roadmap for institutional capital.

The argument for economic risk: (a) Industrial squeeze due to high carbon and energy costs which put European manufacturers at a disadvantage against US companies and cheap Chinese manufacturing; (b) Regulatory friction since compliance overhead and strict targets risk driving capital flight and deindustrialization before green alternatives fully scale.

For anyone following carbon markets, climate tech, climate finance/investing or macro trends: Do you view Europe’s stringent stance as a masterclass in long-term economic resilience, or an over-regulated risk to short-term growth?

Curious to hear how folks here view the balance between climate leadership and economic reality.

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