Quick Competition / Your Thoughts / Asset Classes

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen

I have a quick competition for you. The first one to answer wins a one-ounce silver coin. Below you will find a sentence fragment from the beginning of the first chapter of a brilliant book, which still has a certain topicality even after having been published initially 25 years ago.

«Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future…»

Competition

If you are the first to name the book’s title, the one-ounce silver coin is yours, and your first name will be published in my next Stefan’s weekly.

Your thoughts

I picked two of your emails and allowed myself to publish the writer’s thoughts and my replies in slightly condensed versions.

David’s thoughts

«Good point, Stefan! We increasingly worship at the altar of celebrity. How is a punk entertainer with a mob following qualified to offer advice on investment products or pharmaceuticals? Or climate change? It is apparently very effective.»

Adrian’s thoughts 

«However, what is impressive and unfortunately often not done, every investor should ask himself the following questions:

1. What do I know others do not know?

2. Is the investment in my area of expertise?

If you can answer both with yes, you are already on the right side but not yet ready. After that, you have to ask yourself, what if I am wrong with my assumptions?»

My response

One of the problems I see lies in the growing gap between people who actively accumulate knowledge because they like doing so and people who do not because it bores them. Many of the population cannot find the concentration to read books or an article exceeding the length of headlines. Their attention span is too short, and their knowledge is mainly built from watching T.V. and social media and discussing issues with peers from the same socio-cultural cohorts.
If we now consider that different perspectives on most social issues are pretty permissible, but we see how vehemently, intransigently and sometimes primitively our seemingly sensible and somewhat educated political elites defend their positions, we should not be surprised if the average citizen proves incapable of abstracting. If their superstars, idols from sports, fashion, film, and music, keep telling them what to do, they will.
Maybe the trained adoption of different perspectives at school, high school, and university, as well as a school development that is as permeable as possible, can bring about an improvement under certain circumstances. But, on the other hand, we must not harbour any illusions; the probability is very high that we will have to live with the status quo.

Asset classes

From the feedback I received, the asset classes you wanted to include in this year’s year-end competition are crude oil, gold, silver, Bitcoin, Dow Jones, S&P, Tesla, and others. Now, Tesla is, of course, an individual stock, and Bitcoin is a particular cryptocurrency, and therefore I would like to choose gold because we are the gold experts, silver because we very much like silver and the S&P because the by far most prominent part of assets managed by Incrementum is of course invested in equities.

Please feel free to share your ideas and thoughts with me, but please do not forget (instead of hitting the reply button) to send your messages to smk@incrementum.li

Many thanks, indeed!

I wish you an excellent start to the day, a wonderful weekend, and above all, joy!

Yours truly,

Stefan M. Kremeth
CEO & Head of Wealth Management
Incrementum AG – we love managing assets

Tel.: +423 237 26 60
Cell: +41 79 303 48 39
Im alten Riet 102
9494 Schaan/Liechtenstein
Mail: smk@incrementum.li