As I’ve mentioned in other threads, I’ve got some cash savings that I’d like to do more with, still being a decade plus away from retirement age. I’ve been planning on putting a chunk into my Vanguard index fund, as o usually do during tax time.
However, current events have given me some pause.
For one thing, given recent executive statements about recent market conditions, am I helping the administration or taking advantage of their bellicosity if I invest now? It feels reeeeeally off putting to me, but this is my future, that I’m personally responsible for; how much of it am I expected to sacrifice for the greater good? And I know I’m not supposed to try to time the market, but can I ignore what’s going on?
On the other hand, I have little idea if I’d truly be betraying my political beliefs by investing now. If not, I’d be letting Trump dictate my future (more than he already is) and losing out on security for nothing.
Which brings to mind taxes. I’ve been thinking about this seriously. I hate much of what my tax dollars are funding, but even now, a lot is still being spent on things and people that I agree truly need help. Am I wrong to be concerned with future penalties or the unlikely prospect of prison by making a statement through the IRS?
Then there’s the question of whether any of this is relevant or if I should liquidate retirement accounts that I’ll never use and buy, uh, personal defense instead.
How are you all putting your money where your mouth is, for these or other issues? What assumptions are you making about your personal future? How do you navigate the complex connections between the personal and the public?
I’m in my mid 40s, so I have plenty of time to ride this out. In the mean time I’m just leaving my scheduled buys in place and added a few new ones. On the assumption that the market will not only recover, but climb higher over the next 20 years, buying while it’s lower seems like a good idea to me.
I can’t tell you how I’d feel if I was investing needle moving amounts of money but tossing a few hundred or a few thousand dollars at an investment isn’t likely to change much for anyone other than you.
Are you asking if you’d be risking jail time or penalties if you don’t pay your taxes…yes, yes you are.
I, obviously, don’t know how much you have in your retirement account, or anything else about your finances, but guns aren’t that expensive ($500ish). If you’re low enough on cash that you need to take money out of a retirement account to buy one, you might consider if that money could be better spent elsewhere.
In any case, I think you’d do well to sit down with someone that can look at your finances as a whole and help you make some decisions.
Unless you’re wielding the sort of cash that actually affects markets, I don’t feel like you have any obligation to really consider your effect on the geopolitical situation or anything like that. Your goal is to maximize your return on investment.
You might however, choose not to invest in companies that aren’t aligned with how you think the country and world should work. Like say, not in Russian ones, or defense industry, or in alcoholic beverage companies.
I don’t believe in socially responsible investing but respect those who do. One problem is that it could be hard to find a fund that excludes exactly the kind of companies you are uncomfortable with.
I am going a little less on American stock index funds because of Trump. So in Vanguard-speak, you could put less in VTI (essentially the whole U.S. stock market, except maybe penny stocks) and more in something like VEU (Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US ETF).
However, a lot of the companies in those indexes, and almost all of the big ones, are multi-national, with exposures both in and out of the U.S.
P.S. Another way of socially responsible investing would be to vote your shares for directors and proposals that meet your personal values. This is complicated, and I do not bother. But there are some options. Google Vanguard Investor Choice.
Just noting that a lot of political discussion both here and elsewhere is fundamentally about whether this assumption will hold true, which is the basis for much of this discussion, in my opinion.
For the most part, regular people like us really can’t know. If we did, we’d know what to do and we’d all be rich.
In your OP your question was “What assumptions are you making about your personal future?”. My assumption about my personal future is that the market will recover and climb higher before I retire and, based on that assumption, I’m continuing to throw money at it.
Something worth keeping in mind, IME, is that people discussing (journalists, radio hosts etc) the market tend to be very, very short sighted. Back when I used to listen to stock market/investment radio shows, it seemed like at least once a week the stock market was the ‘highest it’s ever been’ and ‘can’t possibly go any higher’ and ‘we’re due for a correction’ and ‘it’s going to tank sooner or later’…constantly. And back then, the DJIA was 10,000 points lower than it is today. That was one of the big reasons why I stopped listening to them. It was always the best day ever or heading for a recession. Not much in between. It’s like the shows are aimed at day traders that are more worried about what’s going to happen in the next few hours than the next few months or years.
But this is why I’m suggesting you find someone to sit down and talk to. They can look at your finances as a whole as well as what you want to do and are able to do moving forward and come up with a plan that works for you. Plus, it gives you one, hopefully level-headed person to listen to instead of all kinds of contradictory and probably wrong information you’re going to get from random people on the internet like me.
The problem is finding someone whose financial interests are aligned with yours, and who has good judgment, and has expertise in market behavior and portfolio theory. Most people like that are not going to sit down and talk to you, for free. And the people who do it for money mostly want to argue against academic theories AKA the evidence.
This book, by a retired economist once responsible for Princeton University’s endowment investment strategy, is the best book I’ve seen on how to think about this:
If you don’t want to know the theory, but just want some reasonable advice from disinterested experts, see:
The advice in the above sources would of course have to be combined with something else if you want your investments to have some connection to your politics. As I said before, Vanguard customers – specified as the investment company in the OP – can check out Vanguard Investor Choice to vote their shares consistent with their values.
I would argue that staying out of the market is playing into Trump’s hands even more than investing is. The more stock little guys like you control, the less the fat cats do. Just stay away from specific investments that have a direct connection to Trump and company, and you’re morally in the clear.
The obvious one there is to avoid the stock of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (NASDAQ DJT). Is that all you mean?
For U.S. investors who want to diversify to the max, like me, this means making some compromises.
One pretty-good option is the S&P500 (Vanguard VOO). Traditionally it maps pretty tightly to broader indexes of U.S. stocks (those, like VTI, have DJT), but if I recall correctly this is no longer as true. Good news: AI tells me DJT is pretty far from meeting the S&P500 criteria.
One could also stick to non-US indexes.
Problem for me: Getting out of anything with a tiny DJT exposure would generate too much taxable gains in a single year. And then, in a few years, maybe DJT will be in the S&P500
Question for anyone: Do socially conscious broad-based index funds (they exist, right?) have a special rule to keep DJT out, or is he kept out with some existing rule?
That’s the most obvious one, of course, but you might also want to exclude NewsCorp, and whatever name Halliburton is using now, and depending on your views, possibly Musk’s companies, and so on. But the point is, exclude specific companies; don’t exclude the market as a whole.
This only works if you buy individual stocks, something the experts I rely on tell you to avoid. For an example of the difficulty, News Corp is in both the S&P500 and Australia’s equivalent. So to avoid News Corp, you cannot hold any broad U.S. index, nor any broad non-U.S. international index.
And if you do buy individual stocks, avoiding News Corp would be equivalent to disinviting Trumpy relatives from your Thanksgiving dinner – possible feelgood, but politically worthless. Instead, buy News Corp and always vote against the incumbent board of directors.
By the way, for Americans to put the majority of their retirement nest egg in one of the broad exclude-U.S. funds – on the theory that most of the baddies are U.S. – is a diversification mistake because if the value of the dollar collapses, you could be ruined. Of course, if the value of the dollar collapses, your U.S. stocks are likely to also go down. There is no perfect safety.
With something like Vanguard’s VTI, the pluses and minus of being, or not being, an inside trader are averaged out, minimizing any impact to your portfolio of the rampant inside trading. So Trump makes the case against most financial advisors (after all, the authors of books I might recommend are also giving financial advice) stronger yet.
And this is going to improve the performance of fee-for-service financial advisors? How could that work?
Anyway, it’s impossible. Trump would pardon them.
Perhaps some will be sent to prison if a Democrat wins in November 2028. I doubt it will deter insider trading in future Republican administrations for the more of less the same reason that past prison sentence for insider trading do not deter in the Trump administration. The insider traders will always think times have changed and they can now get away with it.
It would put Trump and his cabal of criminals in prison. Works for me. I believe in punishment for crime. Especially crime that hurts others. What say you @PhillyGuy ?
Gotta start somewhere. Why do we imprison muderers?
I just noticed a route for U.S. investors to mostly invest in broad market indexes while leaving out some specific company you do not like, such as News Corp or DJT.
Unfortunately, this requires going outside the Vanguard corral AND requires a $100,000 minimum investment. I was looking at a review for Wealthfront, and they mentioned the:
Re last post, I asked several AI’s for a list of VFTAX companies, and they did not have it. If I understand correctly, the list is “proprietary,” being leased to big companies like Vanguard – otherwise, Vanguard could not create VFTAX. But the list seems unavailable to Vanguard customers like myself. This sounds bonkers. So if I’m wrong, please post a link to the list.
Looking at the criteria given in CaveMike’s link for what companies are excluded, it’s pure guesswork as to whether DJT is excluded. IMHO, DJT should be excluded on grounds of corruption, but I’m not sure what they mean by corruption.
My thought is that News Corp. would be included.
Some kinds of companies excluded, such as those related to cannabis, might be nothing like what progressives here object to. I wonder if it is more an attempt to create a fund limited to sectors that are less controversial than an attempt to create a fund of companies progressives would like.
If the list of 387 is complete, it excludes DJT. But I think the 387 is just the highlights. Using the stated criteria for underlying index Vanguard is tracking, there should be thousands:
The FTSE US All Cap Choice Index probably has roughly 4,000 companies (sorry, I do not see a good link on this).
Yes, News Corp and possibly DJT are tiny components. And with an even broader index like VTI, News Corp. and DJT would be smaller yet.
EDIT: I looked again and am confused. It may be that Vanguard seeks to track the FTSE US All Cap Choice Index while excluding all but the largest 387 companies in that index. If so, that’s why DJT is out. But it still will include other arguably Trump-adjacent companies like Paramount.
First, my point was for the OP to consider ESGs. There are a ton of them and some may align with their values. I should add that ESGs have some additional complications: they may suffer more or less as administrations and policies change. This Kiplinger ESG article goes into more detail of the effects of the current Trump administration. Furthermore, they are based on subjective criteria of what qualifies as Responsible Investing (RI). It is a buyer beware situation.
I gave VTFAX as just a quick example of an ESG. It just tracks the FTSE US Choice Index. FTSE is a British company that has a ton of funds, including ESGs. You can find the fact sheets for their funds here.
@Chronos was correct; FTSE US Choice Index has 380 components. FTSE US All Cap Choice Index is a different index based on the FTSE USA All Cap Index which has 1570 components.
Basically FTSE uses Choice to indicate the ESG version of their Index. Their brief on what this means is:
…after excluding companies involved in Vice Products (Adult Entertainment, Alcohol, Gambling, Tobacco), Non-Renewable Energy (Nuclear Power, Fossil Fuels), and Weapons (Civilian Firearms, Controversial Military Weapons, Conventional Military Weapons). Companies are also excluded based on Controversial Conduct and Diversity practices.
A final comment on the FTSE fact sheets: The Choice versions do not all list their components, but you can start with the non-Choice versions and subtract out the companies that don’t fit.
The VFTAX link has much more detailed information on what this ESG means in the Important note section. It is too long to copy here, but is very interesting.
The OP’s question is really quite interesting – given enough constraints, it might be hard to find an index fund that fits and makes money. Certainly anyone uncomfortable with AI would not be happy with the FTSE ESGs. At least the ones we’ve discussed – maybe there are more targeted funds. The Kiplinger article does list their 20 picks for RI companies along with their reasoning.
