Wall Street Wants You to Be Manic. Be Focused Instead.

Wall Street wants you to be a short-term event addict. If you are overly focused on daily happenings, you will often be confused, make suboptimal decisions, and likely lose lots of money because you don’t understand how to focus upon, much less find, the path that leads to consistent returns.

By obsessing over event outcomes—like this week’s Federal Reserve interest-rate decision —you are essentially wagering on costly flip-of-the-coin trades. The Street’s sophisticated practitioners, though they rarely mention this in public, consider market events to be notoriously hard to predict. But they’re all too happy to profit from amateur investors.

You wouldn’t know this bias exists because economists, traders, strategists, and stock analysts have palavered for months about the first rate cut in ages.

Juxtapose their incessant chatter with how many times you have heard Warren Buffett or Thomas Peterffy, perhaps the world’s greatest options trader, use their powerful platforms to pontificate about short-term events, much less chatter about monetary-policy meetings or corporate earnings reports.

If you want to be a more successful investor, don’t waste your limited energy and resources on quotidian matters that lead nowhere. Instead, use your time to identify and continually refine enduring guiding principles for your investments. This is important. Investing is a multidimensional strategy game played over decades against people all over the world.

Your goal is simple. When you finish, you want to have much more money in your brokerage account than when you began. Let others sound smart opining on whatever the day brings. Focus yourself on owning quality, blue-chip stocks that ideally pay dividends and that monetize powerful societal themes. Artificial intelligence, the privatization of finance, and the aging of America will have staying power regardless of what the Fed does.

Once you have established a foundation for your portfolio, make sure it benefits from the power of compounding returns. There are many ways to create a compounding engine. Reinvesting stock dividends is the easiest. Trading options is only a bit more complicated. Sell put options on stocks you want to buy. Sell call options on stocks you are willing to sell at a higher price. It’s that simple.

It is easy to forget how effective those approaches are amid the ever-expanding Tower of Babel that looms over markets.

After an almost comical debate about the magnitude of Wednesday’s interest-rate cut, the Fed opted to lower rates by half a percentage point. Stock prices initially rallied higher on the news, but so did the Cboe Volatility Index or VIX. The “fear gauge” normally falls when stocks rise, so the abnormal movement suggests that some institutional investors are buying bearish index puts—which increase in value when stock prices decline—to hedge their portfolios. Since the VIX’s initial surge, it has been volatile, indicating that they are unsure what to make of such a strong rate cut.

At day’s end—barring a massive stock decline—who cares? Stock prices may fluctuate, but the Fed’s decision has little impact on major investment themes.

“If the market sells off, implied volatility expands, options premiums expand, and you get paid more for selling options,” says Michael Schwartz, Oppenheimer’s chief options strategist, who has played the game for more than five decades.

There is a reason why we prefer selling options as opposed to buying them. Puts and calls are generally too expensive. Dealers tend to raise prices because they have to make money whether stocks rise or fall. Besides, most people buy options to get rich quick, though that rarely happens.

Instead, take advantage of financial facts made truer by time. It’s better than engaging in the bumper-sticker intellectualism that defines much financial commentary and treats the markets like a never-ending sporting game.

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Originally Posted September 18, 2024 – Wall Street Wants You to Be Manic. Be Focused Instead.

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