Scott Sheppard
May 16, 2022
Tactical Growth Mandate - Weekly Briefing
The stock market destruction continued this past week. To give you an idea of how bad the selling was, the S&P500 was up 2.39% on Friday, but still finished the week down 3.47%.
As the market has been capitulating to the downside, I have been getting questions from several clients how it’s possible to have a positive YTD return while everything else is down double digits?
The reason I created the Tactical Growth strategy was to be different from the crowd. In general, the notion that over the long run stocks will bounce back is true. You hear this in the media and from other institutions a lot right now. My problem with that philosophy is that in the long run, we will all be dead.
Rather than simply blindly throwing money into the stock market – which is what the Vanguard All-Equity ETF (VEQT) does for 0.20% MER – I like managing risk and taking advantage of it. This allows me to participate in the best stocks when they are going up and jumping out when I get a trade wrong and my “stop loss price” is triggered.
This isn’t about being super aggressive or making high risk bets with money – nothing could be further from the truth. This strategy is about managing downside risk first and investing when the odds of gains outweigh potential losses.
We simply don’t know how bad markets can get and when enough pain is enough. Just because it’s been painful for a long time doesn’t mean it can’t get worse. Just because we’re due for some good news doesn’t mean it’s imminently coming – just ask my Toronto Maple Leafs…