The week will bring lots of important news on inflation and on the auto sectors and from Adobe on developments in AI. With some strange wrinkles in timing due to the short Good Friday schedule.
So what do you do with your portfolio for the rest of 2023? And what’s your best strategy to be prepared for 2024? In Part 1 of this Special Report I laid out the 10 developments that I thought would drive the financial markets for the rest of 223 and into 2024. Today, in Part 2, I’m going to give you the first 2 of 10 moves to take–with as much detail and as many specifics as possible–that you should be making now to position your portfolio for the uncertainties of the last quarter of 2023.
Now that Fed day is done and behind us, we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Back on September 15, I posted “A tough day for tech–Part 1” after news on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) reporting that the company was slowing orders with suppliers of chip making equipment because of sluggish demand for chips from its customers. Now onto Part 2 of bad news for tech stocks.
Adobe’s recent earnings report and guidance leave investors, at least those of us still paying any attention at all to valuation, in a bit of a quandary. Do we sell Adobe on that lackluster forecast for earnings and revenue growth over the next two quarters (and what looks like a stretch, very stretched valuation) or do we hold on with the hope that the market continues its love affair with everything AI?
I think a well-constructed portfolio should resemble an onion. (Yes, to continue the analogy, it may make you cry in the short term, but the end result after cooking time is yummy.) At the center of that onion is a core built of stocks with extremely high, risk-adjusted potential rates of return. These stocks won’t deliver the kind of huge gains you can reap from investing in a risky bet–if everything turns out right for that company and its stock. But neither are they likely to crash and burn because something goes wrong at the company. These core portfolio stocks will drop if the market as a whole heads south, but they will drop less and recover faster. These aren’t buy-and-forget, or hold-forever stocks. They can soar to unreasonable valuations at times and an active investor should take profits at some point of overvaluation. (I did a YouTube video recently (you can find it on any of my sites) on when to sell a very overvalued Nvidia, for example.) And they can trade at big discounts to fair value (which is, of course, when the steely-eyed among us will buy) because management has made a mistake or between the industry in which they do business is slumping, or because the market for the company’s goods and services has taken an unexpected direction. At that point, you’ll need to consider selling or adding to your positions depending on your analysis of how long the damage might last and how bad it is. But the point of this core to your stock portfolio is that these are companies that will deliver index-beating results with relatively small risks. Which will enable you, the investor, to plan how to achieve your financial goals with relatively less worry and uncertainty. So, without further ado, here’s my list of 10 stocks for a core portfolio–with the very important “whys” for each pick.
In Step #3 of my Special Report: 5 Moves for the Next 5 Months, on March 24 I added three Big Tech stocks–Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe (ADBE), and Nvidia (NVDA) to my Volatility Portfolio ahead of earnings season. My theory, explained in that post was that we were facing a tough earnings season for most stocks and that reliable earnings growth from Big Tech would make those stocks look like a safe haven in a period when the Standard & Poor’s 500 as a whole was projected to show a drop in earnings. (I also owned up to my mistake in selling Nvidia back on February 16. That was just wrong. More on why I was wrong and why I’ve changed my mind on that in a post tomorrow or so.)
Here’s Step #3 in my 5 Steps for the Next 5 Months Special Report
This is going to take me a while to get all five steps posted. The market situation is very complicated right now and the appropriate solutions are very specific. I’m going to start with the short-term moves you need to be making NOW and then gradually extend my recommendations to cover the entire next five months. I’ve now posted Steps #1, #2, and #3
You can understand the gold rush: One AI stock is up 105% (and 78% in the last month) in 2023 as of the February 17 close.
But are shares of that company, the software artificial company C3A (AI), the stock you want to own, or is this stock simply a beneficiary of hot money jumping on anything that sounds like artificial intelligence? As one market observer put it on Seeking Alpha recently, “The ticker is more valuable than the company.” This doesn’t mean that the current revolution in artificial intelligence isn’t real. And here I give you my 7 picks for investing in the latest AI revolution
If you worry about what worries me right now, I know what you want to know. When will the selling stop? When will it be a good time to buy “bargains”? And What stocks should you buy when you begin to buy? Those are the three questions that I’ll answer in this Special Report. Along with listing my first three buys on this selling.
Stocks rose today, December 10, as a huge jump in CPI inflation exactly matched economists’ projections. As they say on the basketball court, “No surprise; no foul.” The Consumer Price Index (CPI) climbed at a 6.8% annual rate in November.
Shares of DocuSign (DOCU) should have dropped on Friday. After all, almost everything technology was down on the day and the company reported that growth in demand for its electronic document-signing products, which had soared during the Pandemic, had slowed as more workers went back to the office. Earning for the third quarter were 58 cents a share on an adjusted basis. That was above the 46 cents a share expected by Wall Street analysts. However, revenue, including revenue from acquisitions, rose “just” 42% to $545.5 million Analysts were expected revenue of $594 million for the quarter. But a plunge of 42.2%? I’d argue that something else is going on, something that’s related to the market as a whole and not to DocuSign in particular.
