> I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
I did it a little more than a week following the election, but same. I even sold any ETFs with exposure to the US market I previously owned. People thought I was overreacting selling my VGRO, but the YTD returns for my ex-US portfolio are about 150% of what I could have expected with my old holdings and the peace of mind is priceless.
I've kept about 1/3 of my investments in a non-US index fund for years, basically as a hedge against some unforeseen event in the US (having 100% exposure to the economy that my job is in seemed suboptimal). In 2016, all that really changed was that the event was now foreseen -- my domestic investments still outperformed that portion until this year.
This year is the first time that fund outperformed the rest of my portfolio. Not massively, since I do have some holdings that benefited from the AI boom, but noticeably. Just adding 1 to n here. Thanks for reminding me to rebalance, and maybe find another non-AI-related hedge just in case.
Most professional financial planning would have the equity assets portion of the portfolia you at ~30% investing in foreign assets (good times and bad).
> I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
That sounds pretty black swan to me, I'm guessing you never felt the need sheet any previous election? Being predictable and being unique are different things.
Black swan event: an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now.
I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
> Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
While it is kinda the same direction, it also has two Black Swan components:
1) What he's doing actually matches the rhetoric, e.g. actually trying to kick out illegal immigrants even though they're the (underpaid) farm workers holding back food price inflation.
2) It definitely wasn't on my metaphorical bingo card that someone with multiple felony convictions and who had been impeached twice for trying to interfere with the democratic hand over of power, went on to become the popular choice for president.
If Harris had won, she wouldn't have sent ice to invade cities and kidnap people. She wouldn't have hugely increased tariffs, etc. see also putting political minders at network news places as part of federal sales approvals.
America has two options; either become the slave of China and enter our century of humiliation, or deny Chinese access to free trade by competing in market economics. Protectionism does not balance America's trade deficits, and US citizens cannot compete against Mexican labor (let alone Chinese prison labor). The economics of it genuinely don't get any simpler than this; American manufacturing will be for naught if we cannot compete in a free market. We already have a successfully financialized economy, throwing out Reaganomics for an even more shit deal is peak neoreactionary nonsense.
> Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
I saw the signs of the beginnings of it decades ago (shortly following the Reagan era) but I had zero clue that it would (or even could) ever get as completely mad-house outta-control as it has. I've watched the situation devolve year after year for decades now, and all the while I kept foolishly believing "It can't keep getting worse forever. People are gonna wake up any second now." Well, here we are. Not entirely sure how we got here, or how we'll ever get back, but... This is how it is, I guess. :shrug:
"Rock bottom" is when the last human stands alone in their luxury doomsday bunker just waiting to die and realizes that dying with all the money means literally nothing in the grand scheme of the Universe. They didn't "win" anything of lasting value after all...
I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.