During my lifetime of investing, I experimented with multiple types of investments and strategies.  But, when you near or enter retirement, your perspective changes.  Its like riding a motorcycle.  You need to assume you won’t get a second chance.  You can’t make a serious mistake.  No mulligans.

I am normally not very skittish with the day to day market trends and the disaster du jour.  But this business with Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump going on about annihilating each other has me worried.

I  feel like the South Korean gentleman that was interviewed on the news.  He felt most South Koreans could pretty much ignore Kim Jong-un because he is constantly crying wolf, making threats that don’t materialize.  They are not so confident / complacent about Donald Trump.  That does have them worried.

The 2 of them going at each other, having a pissing contest, trying to prove which one has the longest body parts by saber rattling is disquieting.  They do have access to the nuclear triggers.

Now assuming we don’t have World War III tomorrow, the stock market has had a prolonged bull run and is due, at the very least, for a correction.  Although it is a good rule not to try and predict the market, I can easily foresee how a tweet could spark a chain of events leading to a significant reversal of the market.

I can’t predict what will happen, but I am re-positioning a portion of my portfolio to hedge against the upcoming bullshit, whatever it may be.  Will that take a couple of weeks until Kim Jong-un’s mid August threat expires, or will that have to wait (3.5 or 7.5 years) until sanity is restored to the White House?

Time will tell.

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Arnold Solof

Investing in PBP can provide modest returns in a flat, rising, or even slightly declining market. PBP is the symbol for the Powershares (by Invesco) S&P 500 BuyWrite Portfolio ETF.  They classify it as an “Alternative – Hedged Equity”.  So for those unfamiliar with stock options, let me explain how this works.

First of all, an ETF is an Exchange Traded Fund.  It is something like a mutual fund.  It includes a basket of individual investments, stocks, bonds, etc. , depending on the purpose/strategy of the particular ETF.  This is like a mutual fund, except ETF’s trade like stocks;  you can buy and sell shares of them during the regular stock trading sessions, not having to wait for the close of day for a buy or sell order to transact.

The Buy/Write strategy  consists of buying shares of a stock and selling a call option on those shares at the same time.

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