Still, a retirement portfolio should be structured so investors can live with market volatility. If a portfolio's equity stake has gotten out of whack due to appreciation in the stock market, sure, trim it back. But as Trump critic Warren Buffett has said, "You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 percent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress."

Buffett has also said: "A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting."

How good a stock market investor is Trump? It's hard to say. In his book Crippled America, he wrote that 40 of 45 of his stock purchases “rose substantially in a short period of time.”

A Bloomberg story about that claim cited an analysis by Evercore ISI of 670 institutions that had held 20 to 50 stock positions as far back as 2011. “The New York-based research and investment firm measured both the positive strike rate, or the percentage of stocks that are positive each quarter, and the outperform strike rate, the ones that beat the S&P 500,” the story said.

It continued: “The record Trump claims, 40 positive out of 45 stocks, would put him in the 97th percentile among comparable institutions in the first quarter of 2015 and better than all of them in the second and third, according to ISI. Among hedge funds, he’d be in the 94th percentile in the first quarter and beat them all in the second and third.”

And that would be yuge.
 

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