Time Machienes

October 23, 2015 | Dian Chaaban


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Back to the Future Day was this week, Wednesday, October 21, 2015. It’s the date that Marty McFly and Doc Brown time-travel to in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II which proposed that by this year we’d have a multitude of tech gadgets including hands-free video game, flying drones, video phones and flying cars.

While we haven’t made much progress toward flying cars yet (startup Arx Pax has successfully created the world’s first real $10,000 hoverboard called the Hendo), many of the film’s other predictions have actually come to fruition—and many others are at the very least, very close; robot chefs go on sale in 2017 and the Chicago Cubs might still have a slim shot at the World Series.


Let’s rewind to August 20th - it was the beginning of the summer’s major selloff (initially ignited by weak data out of China) and had I put you in a time machine and showed you a rally like todays only 2 months later, would you have believed me? Markets soared worldwide today after China cut interest rates for the fourth time this year and thanks to several large-cap US tech companies who reported better-than-expected quarterly results. Shares across Asia, Europe and the Americas climbed (having already been boosted by Thursday's message from ECB chief Mario Draghi that the central bank was ready to adjust "the size, composition and duration" of its QE program) and Wall Street rallied, with the S&P 500 gaining 1% to reach its highest since August 20th.

                                                                                     
On Friday, August 21st, I wrote to you and said:


“Is it all bad? No. The bottom line is that the sky is not falling. We believe that we are still in a long-term secular bull market, and the current pullback is a rare buying opportunity for good businesses with sustainable, superior earnings growth (my favorite sectors remain US Healthcare, US Financials and US Tech for buying opportunities)…”


So while every headline suggested doom and gloom, the best tip to being a good investor is to simply turn the noise off and hire a professional who you trust for the long term. Even when there is an anticipated market pullback, trying to time the market will never pay off as well as time in the market. The brilliant Peter Lynch once said: "Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves."


I couldn’t have said it better myself.