Sunday, January 25, 2009

Do You Need A Personal 5-Year Strategic Plan?

Choosing personal strategic planning life goals

Personal Strategic Planning: A Key to Success


Are you less than thrilled with your financial status, career or personal life? Do you dream of a better life? Just imagine if you could make those dreams come true. The most successful people make their dreams come true; they not only have a dream, they have a personal strategic plan.

What is A Personal Strategic Plan?


A personal or family strategic plan is a high-level plan for achieving your most important life goals -- for realizing your aspirations. At its simplest, the plan includes a description of a "desirable future," your goals and dreams, and the key steps you plan to take in order in order to make those dreams a reality. It really boils down to just two things:

  1. Where do you want to be 5 years from now?
  2. How do you get there from here?

Why Do You Need A Personal or Family 5-Year Strategic Plan?


The short answer is because you want to live your dream. To maximize your chances of success, you need a plan because, as the old saying goes, "failing to plan is planning to fail."

Developing a plan helps you decide what's really important in your life, set priorities, and focus your resources -- time, money, energy, attention -- where they will do the most good.  A plan helps you make better decisions and take the actions that will get you where you want to go.

When Do You Especially Need a 5-Year Strategic Plan?


Personally, I think everyone can benefit from having a plan. For example, a strategic plan is useful if:
  • You are less than ecstatic about the status quo. You want more. Or,
  • Your life is good, but you want still better; you're tired of settling for "good enough."

However, a plan is especially important if you are contemplating a new direction that could change your life forever -- such as:
  • Going to college or graduate school
  • Beginning a new job or career, or retiring
  • Buying your first home
  • A major change in your financial situation (e.g., inheritance)
  • A major change in your family situation ( e.g., marriage, divorce, new baby, etc.)
  • A major change in everything* in your life (e.g., a worldwide pandemic...)

What Should Your Strategic Plan Contain?


The most important element of your plan is usually called a Vision; it is your ultimate goal, your dream. Whether your vision is to become a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, or "just" to have a happy, well-adjusted family, it all starts with your dream (or dreams). As the old saying goes, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." However, you can't stop with your vision. If you stop there, it really is just a dream.

The question is how do you get there from here? You need a roadmap. This is where your dream turns into a plan. What's important is that you identify what's working and what's not working in your life, the critical issues that need to be addressed, the obstacles that need to be overcome, the results that need to be achieved, and come up with a plan to make your dream a reality. There is no magic. You have to make it happen with a compelling dream, hard work, and a plan.  The finished plan is typically formatted as either a mind map or an outline, but you can use any format that works for you.

Start Planning to Realize Your Dreams


So, how about you? Do you have a dream? Do you want to start living your dream? If so, click here and get started now.

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The 3 Step Personal Strategic Planning Process:

1. Discovering Your Vision covers the first step in developing your plan.
2. Identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats (SWOTs): The key inputs to your plan.
3. Creating a Personal Strategic Plan: Using your SWOTs to develop your goals & strategies and write your plan.
Need to see an example first? see A Personal Strategic Plan Example

Still Need More Motivation? Try:

Regrets of the Dying, a blog post by Bronnie Ware. Five poignant lessons she learned during her years of work in palliative care that transformed her life. Insight into the things that matter most in life.
Regina Brett's 45 life lessons and 5 to grow on: Her widely-circulated and reprinted column from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. More "upbeat" than the previous one! :-)
Setting Goals: a 5 minute video by recently-deceased Zig Ziglar. A still more upbeat presentation that will get you going.
If those don't convince you that it's worth taking a few hours of your time to sort through your priorities, and develop a plan, I don't know what else to say....



Copyright © 2009.         Last modified 10/29/2020

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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Secular Bull and Bear Markets Since 1900

I always find it instructive to look at the extremes. So, in this post I will look at the best and worst periods in the last 100 years or so of stock market history -- the secular bull and bear markets. By "stock market" I mean the major U.S. indices such as the DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) and the S&P 500 Index.

Secular bull markets ultimately lead to a market top. I think of the periods that have followed as periods of disinterest. These are long periods where the market fails to reach a sustainable new all-time high. These long flat periods are where we typically see the major bear markets and stock market crashes -- though, interestingly, the crashes do not always immediately follow the peaks; some bubbles burst, others seem to just fizzle out.

Three Secular Bull and Bear Market Cycles


In my view there have only been three major, secular bull and bear market cycles in the last 100 years: (For this discussion, you may want to reference the graph of closing prices in 100 Years of Stock Market History.)

1. The 1920's bubble that burst in 1929 (see graph in this post). The Great Depression followed; during that stock market crash, the market went down every year until it bottomed in 1932. It took about 25 years for the stock market to close the year above the 1928 close.

2. The post WWII bull market that peaked in 1965. It took 17 years (1982) until the market permanently eclipsed the 1965 close. However, if you look at the graph in the 100 years post, you won't see anything nearly as dramatic as the post-1928 crash. The market looks pretty flat, with the largest decline not occurring until '73-'74 (that, trust me, felt like a lot worse bear market than it appears to be on the graph).

3. The bull market that began around 1982; it was the longest in history. The dot-com/internet bubble topped out in 1999. The bubble burst in a manner similar to the 1929 market crash, and reached a temporary bottom in 2002. However, it's not yet clear how this cycle will play out. We don't yet know when we will permanently close above Dow 11,500; nor is it clear where the cycle will bottom out.

What Can We Learn From Analyzing the Bubbles and Crashes Since 1900?


Stock market secular bull & bear markets since 1900
Major Bubbles & Crashes Since 1900

Note: To get a feel for the difference in 10-year returns in dollars, see the graph in this post.

The above table (click to enlarge) summarizes some information about the best and worst periods in stock market history that I found useful. You could argue that since I've only included known peaks and troughs it doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know. Obviously, the 5 and 10 year forward returns from a peak are not likely to be very good; similarly, the returns from permanent bottoms cannot be negative. However, it was useful to me to quantify the difference between the tops and bottoms.

Peaks, Troughs and P/E Ratios


Most striking is the difference in NPE, or normalized price/earnings ratios. (Note: For more on NPE, see About Normalized P/E Ratios.) If you divide the 76 years for which I have calculated NPEs into 10 groups (dectiles) according to increasing NPE, the really major stock market peaks are associated with the top two (9th and 10th) NPE dectiles. The two major bottoms are both in the first dectile. The highest NPE ratio (33) is close to five times as large as the smallest (7). I think it's fair to say that the best and worst years provide at least anecdotal evidence that valuation is critical. History, at least since 1900, shows that holding periods beginning in times of very high NPEs show poor returns; holding periods beginning in times of very low NPEs tend to show superior returns.

Because this is year-end data, the 2002 trough is somewhat understated. The actual low in October was around 7300. Even so, the NPE of 16 would only be a 7th dectile reading. Perhaps that's why the 2002 bottom did not prove to be an enduring one.

Note: The above table is in the Benchmark Dates tab of the Stock Market Analysis Model. If you have trouble downloading the spreadsheet, see this post.


Related Posts:


For an index of all stock market posts, by subject area, click here. In addition to the links above, posts that may be of special interest include:
The 1929-1932 Stock Market Crash Revisited: Perhaps the ultimate bear market.
The Extraordinary Impact of Price to Earnings Ratios.
Dow Price/Earnings Ratio Impact on Future Returns - A Summary


Last updated 9/6/2011

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Extraordinary Impact of Price/Earnings (P/E) Ratios

Yearly Returns Driven by Changes in Valuation: Earnings Multiple Expansion & Contraction

In a previous post in this series, I introduced a stock market analysis model/spreadsheet that allowed us to analyze the contribution that earnings, dividends and the change in price-to-earnings (p/e) ratios made to the performance of the Dow for any period during its more than 100 year history. As an example, we looked at DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) total returns from 1994 to 1999 and observed that a large percentage of the annual return during this exciting period was due to an increase in the price/earnings ratio. This is sometimes called an increase in valuation, or earnings multiple expansion.

Is this typical in stock market history? Does a bear… Oops. How about “You betchum, Red Ryder” instead (if you have no clue who Red Ryder was, you can just ignore that comment). The variation in yearly returns is dominated not by earnings or dividends, but by valuation, by expansion and compression of the earnings multiple – though not typically to the extent that we saw in the bull market of the 1990s. On the other hand, in some ways the extremes give us the best clues about what’s really going on.

The Historical Impact of Price/Earnings (P/E) Ratio




Components of Yearly Stock Market Returns
The above graph (click to enlarge) is a close to 100 year history of this phenomenon. It breaks out the contribution to annual stock market return that came from