Life, and Your Investments, Are Not Linear

Discipline. Easy to define, but hard to implement.?

So many people mistakenly believed that their investment should look like this:

When in reality, the random walk down Wall Street, virtually always looks like this:

You see, a perceptive investor knows that their investment account does not look like living in Kansas, having few, if any, hills - and no mountains.?

Perceptive investors know that their investment account “lives in Colorado” and that there are significant upside and downside moves on the upward path to the investment summit.

Think about this point. It’s human nature to want to control things that are uncontrollable. Like what Putin's going to do in Ukraine today, or the outcome of Thursday’s (undoubtedly winning) University of Kentucky Cats NCAA game!

We spend so much time fretting our lives away instead of focusing on the things we can control.

In retirement, the primary control you do have over your financial success is your account/portfolio distribution rate - NOT the week to week, or month to month, changes in the value of your investment account. For example, if you take out a “reasonable” 4-5% annual distribution rate then, long-term, your investment portfolio should be able to grow and offset inflation.

Because your investments “live in Colorado” they will always go up, and down. A proven investment philosophy is one that, over a multiple-year period, not only always reaches the retirement success summit, but minimizes, as much as possible, the occasional slide, that will occur, downhill.

Yesterday we made a significant additional investment in Qualcomm. We even used a little margin to do so. Qualcomm, over the last 30 days had declined 18.71%. Qualcomm's metrics in terms of valuation, product, management, and revenue /earnings path are, in our opinion, excellent. However, while it had produced an excellent 12-month return for our clients, it had also given up double digits over the past month. You see, Qualcomm “lives in Colorado” and not Kansas. I'm glad it doesn't live in Kansas because there are no summits there. Yesterday Qualcomm performed very well and today, went up another 4.33% (as of 3:55PM today our firm’s portfolio has appreciated 1.81%). A good investment manager has to be able to put a complicated geopolitical environment together with good fundamental investment analysis. At Spectrum we utilize a concentrated and predictive investment style to put our client’s monies in front of, what we believe, are probable events and probable outcomes. We do not believe that our portfolio, or anyone's portfolio, should live in Kansas or ever will move in a straight line. Life has its peaks and valleys too. Let's live them well!

C. Kelly Buckley, MBA, CFP?

Managing Principal

Spectrum Financial Alliance Ltd., L.L.C.

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Full listing of all disclosures: (bit.ly/3lGX3mM)?