\n
It\u2019s been a busy time at the Lazy Man household with the kids back in school. With 20 years of personal finance under my belt and a blog that loses money, my interest in writing has been at an all-time low. I\u2019m still doing the things that I\u2019ve done before, following the financial news, and last week a couple of headlines caught my attention.<\/p>\n
1. Oil, Oil, Oil<\/h2>\n
The first was that oil was spiking again. Headlines also had diesel fuel break through some record numbers. News came out, that a key pipeline was badly damaged. Satellite pictures backed it up. Some \u201cexperts\u201d (who knows if these are experts or not) were quoted as saying that it might take weeks to repair. The U.S. Government said it would take only a couple of days to repair it, with little disruption.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not a big believer in the U.S. Government statements nowadays. They use some weird Orwellian Doublespeak to label any bad news as \u201cFAKE NEWS\u201d (often in screaming capitals like that). With that in mind, and seeing the satellite pictures and experts\u2019 predictions, I figured oil was on its way up. In fact, it had already gone up, because the market moves quickly. I thought it would keep going up over the next couple of months as supply was cut. I had also seen news that many countries (including the US and China) have their lowest oil reserves in many years.<\/p>\n
So I decided to invest a little money and buy the United States Oil Fund LP (ticker: USO). I had bought it before and pretty much always lost money, even with dollar-cost averaging. I didn\u2019t realize that it uses futures contracts and other complex things. Without getting into the weeds here, it seems like the kind of thing that you don\u2019t want to hold too long. In fact, when I bought it, my broker made me check a box saying, \u201cAre you sure you want to do something this stupid?\u201d (Okay, it didn\u2019t put it quite like that.)<\/p>\n
I clicked the box and bought, and over the next three days the price of oil dropped, and I lost 8.5%. Now you know why I used the word \u201cBetting\u201d in the title. Fortunately, I knew better than to buy a lot, and the loss was less than $300 in a retirement account that I won\u2019t use for at least 9 more years.<\/p>\n
2. Treasury Bills Reach 19 Year High<\/h2>\n
You may have noticed that I never write treasury bills. Or maybe you didn\u2019t notice because I haven\u2019t written about them. I don\u2019t write about them because I don\u2019t really know that market well. I invest more in stocks and prefer the opportunity for big growth. That\u2019s worked out very well over the years.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, I have a friend who I like to call ChatGPT. This friend seems to have all the world\u2019s knowledge and is only too happy to teach me just about anything. When I see something reaching 19-year highs, I think to myself, \u201cWhat goes up must come down.\u201d Of course, that\u2019s not always true \u2013 look at the stock markets over any reasonable number of years. In this case, the Treasury yields were at these highs.<\/p>\n
When I asked ChatGPT how to take advantage of these high yields, it put together a $100,000 portfolio with various things I could buy. I wasn\u2019t about to invest $100,000, but one thing that caught my eye was the Vanguard Extended Duration Treasury ETF (ticker:EDV). I like investing in ETFs because I\u2019m familiar with how to do that with my brokerage.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll want to do your own research if you go down this route, because my friend ChatGPT isn\u2019t perfect \u2013 and my explanation of it is even less so. In any case, when interest rates go up, EDV goes down. Interest rates are fairly high and seem to be going up, so EDV is down nearly 11% this year and 58% over the last five years. Interest rates were very low in the COVID recovery and got raised to reel in inflation. That\u2019s what\u2019s going on now, except rates are starting high, and Trump is pressuring them to stay low despite inflation issues.<\/p>\n
EDV caught my attention because it\u2019s paying around 5.4% interest, and the price itself has the potential to go up a lot IF (and this is a HUGE IF) interest rates go down. I don\u2019t expect interest rates to go down any time soon, but in the next 3-5 years? I can see that. Of course, I would have said that a few years ago and have been wrong so far. In any case, this \u201cbet\u201d is up 2.5% (or about $100) since I bought it.<\/p>\n
Final Thoughts<\/h2>\n
I don\u2019t know if you caught my warnings above, but this isn\u2019t for the typical investor. These could backfire spectacularly. That\u2019s why I invested a relatively small amount of my portfolio. Nonetheless, if you want to learn something, there\u2019s nothing like having some skin in the game.<\/p>\n
Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been a busy time at the Lazy Man household with the kids back in school. With 20 years of personal finance under my belt and a blog that loses money, my interest in writing has been at an all-time low. I\u2019m still doing the things that I\u2019ve done before, following the financial news, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7064854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[34964,1640,40777],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7064853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","tag-betting","tag-oil","tag-treasuries"],"yoast_head":"\n
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