Haven’t you heard? A recession is coming!
This has been played over and over again on the news coming from many many sources, so it must be true right?
Yes, it is true that at some point in the future we will in fact enter a recession. The economy never has sustained an uptrend for this length of time and there are some indicators ie. inverting yield curves that hint at a possible recession coming.
We don’t care.
Yes you read that right, we don’t care about the “upcoming” recession and there are a few reasons for why that is. First off we’re dividend investors, every trade we make we do so to try and secure more passive income for ourselves moving forward. We try and pick good stable companies who will at least maintain their dividend payouts through tough times and ideally continue to raise them but for now we’ll leave dividends out of the equation.
The real reason we don’t care about the upcoming recession and why we won’t attempt to “time” it can be more easily understood once studying the following chart of the S&P 500 from the early 2000’s until now and go over how hard it is to tell WHEN a recession is coming and also HOW LONG a recession may last for:
Now, at a glance it is very easy to identify the large pull back from the end of 2007 through to 2009 and then the magnificent returns the market has shown from 2009 until now (2019).
The WHEN?
What we like to focus on though is the emotion involved in investing and what attempting to pick a bottom on a chart like this would do to an investor.
If you focus in on points like April 2011, 2015 as a whole and more recently the end of 2019 you’ll see the most highlighted examples of market pullbacks during this “bull run” and as you may have guessed also the most hyped up talks of the “inevitable recession” that has been hitting us since at least 2015 if not earlier.
That’s right – people, sorry, professionals have been calling recessions basically every year since the last recession and at some point all of them will be right.
Our point in all of this is that nobody knows when it will be or how severe it will be so why miss out on opportunity of the present?
What if you were one of those people pulling their money out of the market and sitting in cash during 2015 waiting for a huge correction but instead ended up missing out on 4 of the best years in the history of the stock market?
What if you’re one of the people who got spooked by a 5-10% pullback and sold only to buy back in once you saw the market boom for the next 6 months following – re-entering the market at an average cost much higher than what you have had originally?
So yes, while we agree that a recession is likely coming in the not too distant future we don’t want to miss out on how high the markets may get before that time, nor do we want to attempt to time the bottom of the pullback constantly going “we’re down 5% do we average down? now its 10% continue averaging?”
No. Instead we will continue to stick to our game plan and buy into our favourite companies at valuations that are fair to us at that given point in time and of course, should the markets fall we will continue to add to these positions.
How long?
The second point we’d like to get across is that recessions don’t happen overnight, nor do they recover immediately.
Take a look at the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
This market began to fall roughly October 2007 and continued down until it bottomed in early 2009, roughly 16 MONTHS! It also didn’t bounce right back and hit new highs either. The markets needed until February/March 2013 to re-establish those new highs, that means that for 5.5 years you were buying the way down and buying the way back up and while we would love to have a flash sale on all of our favourite stocks for a few weeks or months and then resume hitting new highs well into our retirement the real recession that we expect is a lot more similar to the one above where we have more than enough time to continue plowing money into our holdings.
We hope that you’ve gained something from today’s post, if you have any questions or comments to add to the discussion please leave them below or contact us on Instagram @FindependenceCanada
Thanks for stopping by,
FIC.