The Dividend Cafe

I was going to use this week’s Dividend Cafe to continue the discussion on China, one that I more exhaustively began three weeks ago, then expanded upon last week. And in fact, I have done a podcast interview with Louis Gave of Gavekal Research on this very topic, poking him and pushing him around his thesis that China’s strategic objectives in their bond market and currency are aligned with the objectives of U.S. investors. But I am going to hold this for next week, first of all, to give my communications team time to properly curate and edit that interview, but also because I believe there is a more timely message that is needed this week. By the time you are reading this, I presume Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, will have given his speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I am very purposely writing this before such a speech has been delivered or pre-speech teasers on its content have been circulated. I am, therefore, obviously writing it before I know the market reaction to the speech (stock or bond market). This is on purpose. I do not want the focus to be on what is or is not said at Jackson Hole today, or what the market does or does not do after such speech. I want Dividend Cafe to be about the extraordinary problem that we even care about so much, to begin with about this speech. Far more than anything that is said today is the fact that there even is such a focus on it to begin with. And this hype, this prioritization, this captivation in financial markets, with one man giving one speech on one day, is symbolic of where I feel so much has gone wrong. And what THAT is and what it specifically means to you is the subject of this week’s Dividend Cafe. Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

I got a lot of feedback on the special “China edition” Dividend Cafe two weeks ago, but I promised a lot more to come on the subject, and that is what we have today. I don’t only want to walk through various perspectives on Chinese investment, but really want to make sense of what much of this means for hemispheric changes taking place in global monetary realities. There is a tremendous investment relevance to all of this, and that will be just as true for anyone who never buys a dollar of Chinese stocks, bonds, or currency. We ignore this topic to our own peril. It has been a historical week in a lot of ways, and I have written about Afghanistan and its potential impact on American domestic policy throughout the week at The DC Today. We will know more next week about the sausage-making on capitol hill. Market volatility this week was largely Fed-driven and seasonal. I don’t believe the events in Afghanistan this week will be remembered by markets for minutes, but I believe they will be remembered globally for decades. And globally, we have much to consider if we are to be smart investors. So to that end, we work … Join me in the Dividend Cafe (where as a special bonus today, some pretty hardcore facts about dividend growth superiority will be presented). DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Join David L. Bahnsen, CIO and Managing Partner of The Bahnsen Group and Scott Gamm of Strategy Voice and Associates with answers the important questions from investors. Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

David, Brian, and Deiya take on the investment needs of the day for clients of The Bahnsen Group. DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

We are going to do something unique this week – a deep dive into the massive country that is China. From stocks to bonds to history to currency to geopolitics, this is a big topic, and we do it this week with the sole aim of determining where there may be investment opportunity for our clients, and where there may not be. It is a topic that reveals deep passions and emotions out of many people. Our goal is to remove passion and emotion, and be fiduciary investment managers with a burden for optimizing solutions on behalf of our clients. This has serious implications when you look at Chinese stocks, or U.S. bonds. I could make this introduction a full article if I wanted to, but let me resist the temptation to keep bloviating and ask you to dive right in. I believe it is a thought-provoking and useful summary of a few investment considerations in the fastest growing economic region in human history. And we want to get this right. DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

David L. Bahnsen and Scott Gamm discuss the latest market happenings DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

I have been thinking a lot about the stock market lately, but not for the reasons most people think about it. The most common thing people wonder about the stock market is something like this: “Is the market about to go up, or down?” I think long-time readers of the Dividend Cafe know how I feel about that question (“long-time” could mean the last two weeks in this case). I am always and forever agnostic about short-term moves in the broad stock market, not merely around anyone’s (including my own) ability to forecast such, but also around the relevance of it to one’s actual financial picture. But I hear things said about the stock market sometimes that simply concern me. I am going to address a lot of those things this week and look at some basic historical facts of the market and the environment in which we find ourselves. My goal will be to look at what does not represent a “rough” or “troubling” market environment, and what does. And in so doing, I hope we can find some takeaways about portfolio construction that speak to a present application that you will find useful. Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

I do something a little different in this week’s Dividend Cafe – I cover three topics, and pretty separate ones from one another at that. In my mind they are all connected – but lots of things are connected in my mind that may not make sense to others. In this case, I see them as distinct topics yet connected in the sense that they all are part of our investment worldview at The Bahnsen Group. The challenges to dividend growth in index investing, the particulars around the Energy sector in 2021, and the inconvenient truths about bitcoin – these are three separate topics, but they are all topics we have thoroughly developed beliefs about, beliefs that are an off-shoot of our foundation. And we dive into some COVID stuff that is alone worth the price of admission – chart-filled and everything! So view it as one topic with over-arching connectivity, or a three separate topic week, but either way, this is a Dividend Cafe you will be glad you read. DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Hosted by David L. Bahnsen, Founder, Managing Partner, and CIO of The Bahnsen Group and Scott Gamm of Strategy Voice Communications. DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Like most of you, before the financial crisis, I had never heard the term or uttered the term “quantitative easing.” This somehow becomes completely standard fare in the lexicon of finance in the last 13 years, and it is now uttered by people who I am 1,000% positive do not know what it is dozens of times per day in the media. There is nothing wrong with not understanding the obscure vocabulary of monetary economics unless of course, you are sitting around using the obscure vocabulary of monetary economics. But words have meaning, and today we’ll look at some of these words. But we will do more than define words today. After all, you deserve to get your money’s worth for what you pay for this Dividend Cafe subscription! My goal today is to walk you through the history of quantitative easing, explain what policy goal it is serving, what policy goals it is not serving, and what it means to you as an investor. By the time you are done with this read, I believe you will be a QE expert. And I assure you, as a fellow QE expert, nothing makes you more popular at parties than knowing the deep dive of quantitative easing! It’s a good thing I’m married … Okay, QE and why you should care, in this week’s Dividend Cafe! DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com