Thought Starters

One quarter down, here’s what we’ve learned

Three months down, nine to go. We entered 2023 holding our breath feeling like there was bad economic news around the corner. We hope you took a deep breath because one quarter in, it feels like we’re still holding.

On our Instagram page this week we posted a look at how some of the key global markets have started 2023. The takeaway - not bad. Australia up 4%, USA up 7% and China up 5%. Not too many people would’ve predicted that at the start of the year.

And for us, this is just our latest reminder that predicting the short term movements of the market is a fraught exercise. People far smarter and far more experienced that us were saying 2023 could be a year when the stock market fell 20%. It still might. But if we’d followed those experts’ predictions we’d have lost money in the first quarter.

When it comes to investing there are some simple facts that lead to an even more simple conclusion:

• No one can predict the short-term movements of the stock market

• If you missed the stock market’s best 10 days over the past 30 years, your total return would’ve been cut in half

• Over any 20 year period, the stock market has finished higher

For us, when we combine these three facts there is one unavoidable conclusion - don’t try and predict the stock market. Instead invest consistently so we don’t miss out on those few good days.

Here at Equity Mates, that’s what we’ve been doing. And no matter what the experts come out and forecast for the coming three quarters, that’s what we’ll keep doing.

How to make budgeting feel less like a chore

This collection of articles from Pocket is a great look at different tips and tricks to get you on top of your budget. From an introduction to the Japanese art of Kakeibo to a Yale Professor’s review of the 50 most popular personal finance books, there’s plenty in here to get you thinking about how you manage your money.

We love some of these articles and wanted to share the collection because we think others will get value out of it as well. But it is important to remember that personal finance is exactly that: personal. There is no one right way and no one-size-fits-all answer. At its core, all of the budget templates and spend tracking apps in the world are trying to get you to be aware and intentional. To know where your money is going and to consider if that is what you want. So the most important thing when it comes to personal finance and budgeting is to find a system that works for you and that fits how you think about and manage your money.

So read these articles, get what you can from them, and then if you decide it doesn’t work for you don’t hesitate to throw it away. At the end of the day budget culture is much like diet culture. There are hundreds of different diets and eating fads that ultimately want to get you to the same place - energy in less than energy out. Budget culture has plenty of different paths to the same destination - money in is more than money out. We all just need to find the right path for ourselves.

Highlights from Jamie Dimon’s 16,000 word shareholder letter

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, is one of the most respected business leaders around the world. He has recently published a monster of a shareholder letter - 16,000 words covering everything from AI to interest rates. Quartr have done the hard work for us and in this Tweet thread they pull out 15 of their highlights.

From his position leading one of America’s largest banks, Dimon seems to think that the economy and the consumer is holding up okay. He believes that before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, America’s economy may have been heading for a soft landing. Even with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, he writes, we are not even close to a 2008-like crash.

He also writes about competition and the future of finance. For years, Apple has been slowly making their way into banking and financial services. Firstly with the Apple Credit Card, then with Apple Pay and more recently with an Apple Buy Now, Pay Later offering. Dimon writes about the growing competitiveness in the banking space and where he thinks JP Morgan Chase has an advantage.

Matthew Ball: The Streaming Book

Matthew Ball has become notable in tech circles over the past few years for his writing on emerging technology trends and the metaverse. In this ‘mini-book’ he has put together a full account of the emergence of online streaming. The book is broken into four parts and is all available for free on this website.

The first part introduces the book and the “streaming wars”. Then the following three parts track the three phases of this industry as Ball sees it. Firstly, access-based competition which was the era that Netflix pioneered by establishing online video streaming as a way to access content. Then there was content-based competition, the era that we are in now where there are a number of streaming competitors trying to win and retain customers with the quality of their content. Over time, Ball thinks we will enter a third era of this industry - platform-based competition.

Platform-based competition will be an era where these streaming companies use their video platforms to sell a whole lot of other products and services. Standalone streaming services won’t survive, instead a streaming service will anchor a larger platform. It is early days, but we are seeing signs of it. Disney+ is selling merchandise related to shows, Netflix has launched a fitness service and is experimenting with games, and Amazon’s Prime Video is promoting its other platforms like Twitch. For the streaming platforms, this may be the answer to one of their longest running challenges - very few of them have found a way to turn a profit.

Dedollarization is not a thing

One story that we’ve noticed popping up on our news feeds over the past few weeks has been the idea that countries like China and Russia are finding ways to cut out the US dollar from global trade. (A collection of these stories are included here) Labelled ‘dedollarization’ this has got people talking about what could happen if the US dollar lost its status as the global reserve currency.

It felt like we had heard this story before, so this article from Epsilon Theory was useful confirmation that this is a story that pops up every few years. The article pulls out very similar stories going back to the early 2000’s and then looks at what the data tells us. In 1989, 90% (out of 200% - because each currency transaction has two sides) of international transactions were settled in US dollars. In 2022, it was about 89%.

If you have a similar Twitter feed to us (and maybe this feels more like a sign that we need to change who we follow on Twitter), the next time you see a story about the fall of the US dollar, remember this article. And as if to prove the point even further, the article closes with a newspaper column from 1975 warning of the same risk as OPEC planned to cut links with the US dollar.

Over the long stretch of history, at some point, the US dollar will lose its status as the global reserve currency. But just make sure you’re taking these doomsday predictions from social media experts with a grain of salt. None of the data suggests that day is coming anytime soon.

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