antipaucity

There’s often irrational panic in investment markets.

Most recently that’s been due to the Wuhanvirus/coronavirus/covid19 scare.

If you’re selling while the stock market is falling, you’re losing money.

You want to buy low, and sell high – but since you can never know where either the bottom or top is, how can you mitigate against market ups and downs?

Cost averaging.

What is cost averaging? It’s a way of hedging your investments against momentary swings in the stock market by lowering your average cost of each share.

A simplified cost averaging example for Universal Widgets Inc.

Universal Widgets Inc (UWI) is trading today for $10 per share. You like the company, and decide to buy $1680 in UWI shares (a total of 168 shares).

Next month, UWI has dropped to $7 per share. You still believe in the company’s future, and you still have $1680 to invest in the market, so you buy another $1680 worth of UWI stock at $7 per share (240 shares total).

Two months later again, and UWI has dropped to $3/share. Perhaps your confidence in the company has dropped some, but if you sell now, you’re guaranteed to lose over $2000! So instead of selling, and guaranteeing your loss, you again buy $1680 in shares (560 more).

You now have 968 shares of UWI that cost you $5040.

But they’re only worth $2904.

What share price does UWI need to hit in order to show a profit?

Now you merely have a simple math problem: take the cost, subtract the value, and divide by total shares: (C-V)/S

$5040 – $2904 = $2136

$2136 / 986 = ~$2.21

So when UWI gets back above $5.21 per share, you’re in the black.

If/when it recovers to your initial purchase price of $10, your portfolio will be worth $9860!

By cost averaging, you’ve reduced your risk, and increased your likelihood of coming out ahead when investing

Sidebar

This is, more-or-less, how some mutual funds grow (and why beginning investors (and most seasoned investors) should buy-into mutual funds instead of individual stocks).

The Richest Man In Babylon by George S Clason is one of the few audio books I have enjoyed – and one that I think everyone should read/listen to frequently: it’s the early 20th century version of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover (another great book).

The advice/suggestions in this book are things I didn’t listen to soon enough – and I’d hasten to help anyone do earlier what I didn’t 🙂

If you take nothing else from this book, follow the first “law”:

The first 10% is mine to keep

From a Christian perspective, that should be reworded to “the second 10% is mine to steward” (if you presume the first tenth belongs to God).

This sounds difficult – but if you incorporate that single principle into your financial thinking early, you will be very well served later in life.