Zen & The Art of Snow Removal

It's been an interesting and fun weekend with a lot of reading and a lot of snow removal thanks to a snow storm that none of the weather websites knew was coming. 

In case you missed it, Bitcoin and the other cryptos are enduring their latest puke downs and of course all of the naysayers are out pounding their chests about being right and pounding the table about why it's going zero. At some point it will bounce and rally like it has before and all the touts will be pounding their chests about being right and pound the table about why it's going to a bazillion. It's the same sort of extrapolation you see on stock market television. When the market is heading lower, it's a parade of guests who did some selling at the top and see it going lower. When the market is going up, which is most of the time remember, a different set of pundits who bought at the bottom tell us why it is going higher.  

The current Bitcoin episode was an opportunity to dust off one of my favorites that "finding out you have too much AFTER a large decline is a bad place to be" and that if you're sweating this decline, you do have too much.

Josh Brown just had a post about how to endure large asset price declines. He was talking about the stock market but it applies to other assets, like Bitcoin, too. One point he made was comportment, keep it together. I make the point all the time that all stock market declines are the same. It goes down, people get scared, it stops going down at some point and then works back to a new high. The only variable is how long that all takes. I reiterated this point in a client email this past week. A client replied, essentially repeating the point and I was thrilled, they get it!

Once you reconcile that and realize that as a retired person drawing from your portfolio you really just need to be reasonably ahead of your cash needs (cash on the sidelines so you minimize the need to sell down a lot) and as someone still accumulating you really just need to keep contributing with each paycheck then your odds for financial success are very high. It can be that simple.

One way to make it that simple is to not obsess over your money. To say I love working in the stock market would be an understatement. I'm fascinated by when it does what it's "supposed to," fascinated by when it doesn't do what it is "supposed to," I love learning about investment products even if I don't use that many, I love learning new things about portfolio construction and studying investor psychology. All of that but I do not obsess over our account balances. It's counter productive on multiple levels all tying into a poor quality of life.

Lately, this blog has been exploring various aspects of life outside of capital markets and then connecting those various aspects of life back to investing such that it hopefully helps people adjust their thought processes and psychology to be more relaxed market participants. More relaxed means better long term results which might just mean never panicking or otherwise succumbing to emotions again.

This morning, I got out about 6am, while it was still dark to start shoveling the snow. The plow on my ATV is kind of broken (it is broken) so I thought I should shovel in our driveway more than I usually do to reduce the amount of plowing I would do with the ATV, even if just a little. A lot of backing up and going forward again in our driveway. A few months ago my wife brought home that big shovel. You push it the way a farmer a 100 years ago might push on a plow being pulled by a couple of oxen. It's a total game changer because you don't bend over at all to shovel so you don't feel it on your back at all.

After shoveling the small dog pen with a regular shovel, I did the driveway with the big boy, all in 90 minutes and felt great. After feeding the dogs and coffee I went back out to ATV-plow down to the main road. I really enjoy snow removal, shoveling and plowing, because it's a great way to start the day by getting a lot done very early. Also, snow removal is for me an activity like deadlifting where my brain empties out and I am just focused on the task at hand. I don't get that sensation from other weight exercises, just deadlifting. It is a fantastic reboot. Enough of these activities in our lives makes it much easier to avoid/minimize negative behaviors like obsessing over your account balance.

Also, I'd have never gotten this picture of the moonlit snow (taken with my phone on night mode).

Engaging in your financial outcome is an important and productive behavior, it becomes destructive when it drifts into obsessing. Having varying and totally unrelated interests prevents obsession and makes for a much happier and more interesting life.