All posts by Jonathan Chevreau

How to navigate all the newish alternatives to Twitter/X

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Image from The Verge

It’s been two years since Elon Musk acquired the former Twitter, now X. That led to a steady Xodus (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands or millions of formerly loyal users to new platforms like Mastodon and, the following summer, Facebook’s Threads.

Since last week’s shocking re-election of Donald Trump, another wave of X users has left for bluer pastures, this time for BlueSky, founded in part by former X co-creator Jack Dorsey, and some venture capitalists.

There is also a surge of Xpatriates moving to the decentralized Mastodon service. Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko posted Friday on Mastodon that it has benefited from the Xodus as well. Official “app downloads are up 47% on IOS and 17% on Android.” Sign-ups are up roughly 27% compared to the previous month, with 90,000 new accounts.

Thus far, though, Bluesky has drawn more media attention this week. Bluesky has been around since 2021 but had a slow start, beginning with an “invitation-only” approach to big names or those with massive followings. It is now wide open and free to all comers.

But the floodgates have really opened since last week’s election and Musk’s infiltration of the new Trump 2.0 administration. A million new users flocked to BlueSky in the last week alone, bringing the total user base to 15 million, according to Time.  I am one of them, joining on Remembrance Day.

Truth to tell, (certainly not Truth Social!) I had NOT planned to join BlueSky, as I am already on Mastodon, Threads and — oh yeah — Linked In and Facebook. Since I have not yet left X, I felt 5 or 6 social media platforms was probably two or three too many. Even so, some contacts at X the past week suggested I try Bluesky as well, saying the new rush of sign-ups was reminiscent of the good old days of early Twitter.

So, somewhat reluctantly, I signed up, using the same handle as on most of my other accounts: @JonChevreau. I guess part of my reasoning was that when it comes to handles it’s a bit of a land grab and I didn’t want someone else posing as me at BlueSky. That appears to have happened to Mad Money’s Jim Cramer.

Now I’d be the first to say it’s ridiculous to be active on half a dozen social media accounts. It would be nearly impossible for someone with a full-time job and long commute but as I am semi-retired and work from home, it is (barely) manageable. Like most journalists, I’m a bit of a news junkie, though my focus is primarily financial (hence this website) and secondarily, politics (on the theory that politics is always going to impact our personal Financial Independence).

Social media splitting into Red and Blue Silos

Many journalists on X have been agonizing about staying there as standards have slipped under Musk and the site is rife with misinformation, most of it right of centre. In fact at Mastodon, we generally refer to X as “the Hell site.” I see broadcaster Don Lemon just announced his departure from X and arrival on Bluesky.

The problem is of course that many of us have spent the better part of 10 or 15 years building a large network of followers on X. In my case, I restrict most of my X posts to financial content, if only to promote the latest blog from this site. To the extent site sponsors like to see their guest blogs on the site promoted as much as possible on various social media, it’s hard to make the break. It takes years to build up a following in the tens of thousands.

But between Musk buying X and now joining the incoming Trump administration, the die seems to have been inevitably cast. Social media has fragmented into political siloes. X is now a Trump propaganda machine that amplifies what Trump’s own Truth Social was doing. It’s in effect Pravda for the incoming Republican White House. Call it the Red Silo. That was likely the main reason Lemon finally departed.

What you might call the “Resistance” is Threads, BlueSky and to a lesser extent Mastodon, which together I think of as the “Blue Silo.” But in addition to departures from X, I’m also seeing lots of Threads users moving this week to Bluesky: some abandoning it altogether and others opting to become “dual citizens.” One frustration I have myself with Threads is the current limit of following no more than 7500 people. Because of the still-common practice of “reciprocal following,” that policy also curtails Follower growth to a similar number.

Let me go through my evolving personal strategy for navigating these sites. I’ll list these in the order in which I tend to use them first thing in the morning and periodically throughout the day and often evening.

1.) Mastodon

This is my first port of call, even though my Follower account there after two years is less than 10% of what it is on X. Mastodon seems to me to be a bit of a Blue (i.e. U.S. Democrat) silo, as are the next two sites I’ll list: Threads and Bluesky. Presumably many liberal Canadians are sympathetic to that political orientation although things could change soon.

Why do I give Mastodon priority? For several reasons. First, it’s NOT owned by a single billionaire who can upset the apple cart and change the rules on some arbitrary whim. As I explained in a similar post to today’s when I joined Mastodon two years ago — Life After Twitter — unlike the centralized Twitter platform (or indeed Threads or Bluesky), Mastodon is decentralized.

That’s the first thing you need to know about it when signing on. First you have to pick a server, which is run by volunteers around the world. I often get pushback from people checking out alternatives who are under the impression Mastodon is too technical.

It’s not really: all these platforms behave in a similar way, albeit with subtle differences. The main stumbling block with Mastodon is picking the “instance,” which is another word for server. I picked one of the few (or only?) Canadian ones: mstdn.ca. It’s also called Mastodon Canada and bills itself as being run by Canadians for Canadians. Note too that  Mastodon is spelt with the letter o in two places, NOT the letter “a”!

The other big reason I prefer Mastodon is that unlike the billionaire-owned centralized platforms, Mastodon does not use an “algorithm” to steer content in your direction. X, Threads and BlueSky all do this to some extent: either they explicitly ask you what kind of content you want or they gradually infer what you want from the content you appear to gravitate to. Down the road, the danger is they will monetize all this for advertisers or other purposes. When they’re free, remember that YOU are the product! Continue Reading…

A few thoughts on Trump’s victory and investing under Trump 2.0

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By now, there’s not much I can add to the ubiquitous media coverage of Donald Trump’s shocking imminent return to power.

Since our “beat” here is Financial Independence I’ll spin this that way. A few weeks back we looked at a Franklin Templeton webinar on the investment implications of either a Harris or a Trump victory. See this blog I wrote on October 23rd, headlined Don’t mix politics and investing but financial community thinks a Trump victory more positive for stocks.

You can say that again. As I write this in a daze mid Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1300 points or 3%. Bond prices, on the other hand, are going in the opposite direction.

Franklin Templeton also issued a press backgrounder conveying the view of various money managers. For obvious reasons, below I have cherrypicked the ones that address a Trump victory.

Before we get to that, I’ll point to a Globe & Mail column by Andrew Coyne published Wednesday (Nov 6th), in the aftermath of the election result. The headline tells the tale: Trump’s election is a crisis like no other, not only for the U.S. but the world. (likely under a paywall.) The world yes, but especially Canada. If you can access the column also check the hundreds of reader comments, which offer many and varied takes on the implications of Trump 2.0 on the Canadian economy and politics.

Personally, during the run-up to the election I did not tinker with our family’s portfolio to take advantage of any alleged “Trump trade” or “Kamala stocks.” Those who noted this site’s 10th anniversary the day before the election will probably feel this is a broken record, but I’ve found that a globally diversified balanced portfolio with exposure to all major asset classes is adequate preparation for whatever the investment world may have in store for us.

Asset Allocation ETFs play offence and defence

Let the money managers at places like Franklin Templeton, Vanguard Group, BMO ETFs, Blackrock or Robo advisors decide the relative proportions. Those who engage financial advisors or portfolio managers may want to check in for a portfolio update. For average DIY investors, those Asset Allocation ETFs often referred to in this site should allow investors to sleep at night no matter what horrors await us in January and beyond. In other words, the stocks component of these AA ETFs let you play offence and benefit from the rising of stocks as animal spirits take over investors. But a healthy fixed-income allocation also allows you to play defence in case things get too ebullient. As the old saying goes, you want to “Eat well and sleep well.”

Continue Reading…

Findependence Hub turns 10 years old

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Hard to believe but Findependence Hub just turned 10 years old. We launched Financial Independence Hub on Nov. 03, 2014. Here is the very first post.

You’ll note that for a long time, we self-referred with the short-hand “The Hub.” This was of course long before another site was launched a few years back also called The Hub. So we try NOT to refer to ourselves using that short form, as it may be confusing.

However, the slogan still applies: North America’s Gateway to Financial Independence. That’s because both our readers and content providers are in Canada and the United States. Given the population differences, though, we are disproportionately Canadian.

From the start, the aim was to publish at least four blogs a week, and often five. In fact, as of this writing, we had published 2,931 blogs: just shy of 3,000. That’s roughly 300 blogs a year.

As we explained a few weeks ago, generally we don’t schedule Wednesday blogs far in advance, in order to leave that slot open for any late-breaking developments. It also allows us to shuffle the schedule when necessary.

The future

So what of the future? Well, my personal financial life is more or less an open book, between what I write here and what I write every month in my Retired Money column at MoneySense.ca.

As I disclosed earlier this year, I am now 71 and therefore enter the magic land of RRIFs as of the end of this year and into January 2025. At some point, I may retrench blog frequency down to three blogs a week instead of four or five: aiming for Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Happy to hear reader and sponsor feedback on that though. I’m also open to partnering suggestions.

Certainly I would like to thank the registered users who have hung in this far, as well as our advertisers who make it possible to provide this content at no charge to readers. Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Sun Life enters the Decumulation market

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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks in-depth at a new “Decumulation” offering from Sun Life, unveiled late in September. You can find the full column by clicking on the highlighted headline: What is Sun Life’s new decumulation product?

As you can see from image below taken from MyRetirement Income’s website, the emphasis is on providing regular income to last to whatever age a retiree specifies. That income is not, however, guranteed as a life annuity would be.

The Globe & Mail’s Rob Carrick first wrote about this shortly after the Sun announcement. My column adds the opinions of such varied Canadian retirement experts as author and finance professor Moshe Milevsky, retired actuary Malcolm Hamilton, Caring for Clients’ Rona Birenbaum and Trident Financial’s Matthew Audrey, as well as Sun Life Senior Vice President, Group Retirement Services, Eric Monteiro.

Some of the more cynical takes are that this is a way for Sun Life to continue to profit from client financial assets gathered during the long accumulation phase, rather than seeing them migrate to other solutions, such as annuities provided by either one of its own life insurance arms or that of rivals.

Aiming for Simplicity and Flexibility

As Sun’s Eric Monteiro told me in a telephone interview, the company’s preliminary research found that rival products that were first on the market (see full MoneySense column) were often perceived as complicated, and as a result uptake of some of these pioneering Decumulation products have been underwhelming. It sought to create a solution that was relatively simple and flexible.

In essence, it is not dissimilar to some Asset Allocation ETFs, such as Vanguard’s VRIF, which is 50% equities and 50% fixed income. But Sun’s product may and probably will have different proportions of the major asset classes. In fact, it lists 16 external global money managers who deploy up to 15 different asset classes, which include Emerging Market Debt, Liquid Real Assets, Direct Infrastructure, Liquid Alternatives and Direct Real Estate. Managers include BlackRock Asset Management, Lazard Asset Management, Phillips, Hager & North, RBC Global Asset Management and its own Sun Life Capital Management. Continue Reading…

Don’t mix Politics & Investing but financial community thinks a Trump victory more positive for Stocks

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Top investment executives told a webinar held Wednesday morning that investors should not mix Politics and Investing. Even so, while market observers at Franklin Templeton view the upcoming U.S. election as essentially a “toss-up” they seem to believe that a victory or sweep by the Republicans’ Donald Trump would be more positive for stocks than a Kamala Harris win.

Grant Bowers, portfolio manager and Senior Vice President for Franklin Equity Group, said “it’s a 50/50 tossup for the presidential winner. Both candidates are well known so it’s not surprising” there’s been little market volatility in the runup to the November 5th election. Generally, he’s bullish no matter the outcome.  The economy did well in Trump’s first term while a Harris victory would be a continuation of Biden policies. The real differences are on tariffs, fiscal policy and regulation. “The most likely outcome is a split government” but there would be more volatility if there is a sweep by either party.

Of course, it’s quite possible that investors won’t know the official outcome for several weeks. If the process of counting votes drags on and there are legal challenges like there were in 2020, investors can expect more protracted volatility.

Sonai Desai, Chief Investment Officer for Franklin Templeton Fixed Income said the U.S. economy is set to do “quite well. I agree there’s a reduced probability of Recession: that’s not our baseline for a while.” If there’s a Republican sweep and broader tariffs measures introduced by Trump, “that might limit the Fed’s appetite for massive rate cuts.”  Her baseline is that even with a Republican sweep, there won’t be a literal imposition of tariffs: that didn’t happen in 2016, so “I don’t think we will get the full range of cross-the-board tariffs.”  Either way, the mighty U.S. consumer will “continue to consume and I don’t see that changing with the Election.”

Clearbridge’s Jeffrey Schulze

In the very long run, of course, any short-term market volatility from elections is likely to be a blip, which is why Franklin Templeton tells clients not to mix investing and politics.

In an analysis released early in October, Clearbridge Investments Head of Economic and Market Strategy Jeffrey Schulze, CFA, showed the following annual returns for the S&P500, all positive for equities no matter which party wins and whether or not they get full control or are in a divided government. Based on that, the best outcomes for investors would be a Democratic president with a Divided Government or Full Control by a Republican president.

“We view a Trump win, likely coming in a sweep scenario, as net positive for equities as it preserves favorable corporate tax treatment and builds on tax elements that expired,” Schulze wrote in the October 1st update, “A Harris win, likely coming with a divided Congress, would be mildly negative due to fewer provisions of expiring tax legislation getting extended due to political gridlock.”

Trump win likely positive for Stocks

“In aggregate, we view a second Trump presidency under a sweep scenario as net positive for equities. The expectation is for a more favorable corporate tax regime and less of a regulatory burden, both of which should boost corporate profits. Conversely, there is the potential for increased tariffs and retaliation from U.S. trade partners … We view U.S. stocks as best placed under Trump, with banks and capital markets, as well as the oil and gas complex, well positioned due to lighter regulation. Aerospace and defense is also likely going to benefit as well as biopharmaceuticals. Areas that could see pressure are restaurants and leisure, due to the less availability of labor, as well as EVs, autos and clean energy producers.”

Harris win might be “mildly negative” for Stocks

A Kamala Harris win would be less positive for U.S. stocks, Schulze writes: “We see a Harris win as mildly negative to equities should she preside over a divided Congress. It will be more of a headwind to the markets should we see a Democratic sweep as she will then be able to implement higher taxes on corporations and high-income individuals, as well as push a more ambitious regulatory agenda. However, tax credits for low-income individuals would provide an offset, creating an economic boost to this segment of the economy.Tighter regulation could weigh on biopharmaceuticals, banks, capital markets, energy as well as mega cap technology. But again, we caution against basing investment or portfolio positioning solely on the regulatory environment. Areas to be bullish about under Harris would be consumer discretionary, specifically restaurants & leisure, home building and building products.”

Generally, Franklin Templeton continues to advocate a “stay the course” stance for investors geared to the long term. The chart below shows that going back to 1944, the U.S. stock market has risen steadily over time regardless of which political party is in the White House.

 

 

Stephen Dover, chief market strategist and Head of Franklin Templeton Institute, acted as Moderator in Wednesday’s webinar, fielding audience questions. He also wrote a U.S. election update earlier this month, headlined “Uncertainty Reigns.”

He concluded back then that the election remains  “too close to call. A divided government in Washington, DC, with no single party controlling the White House, Senate and House of Representatives is likely … Investors should gird themselves for uncertainty and potential bouts of volatility preceding and following election day. It is quite possible that the outcome for the presidency will not be settled until the December 17 certification deadline.”

Dover expects market uncertainty to continue well past November 5th, if not until January’s inauguration of the ultimate winner.”Legal challenges, some of which have already commenced, add to uncertainty. Re-counts, delays and disputes over certification of results, alongside courtroom litigation are virtually assured if state election outcomes are close. Various legal and procedural challenges are likely to endure until at least December 17, which is the deadline for state certification of the presidential election results and the official nomination of state electors to the Congressional certification on January 6, 2025.”

However, Dover says his basic investment conclusions remain unchanged. They are as follows: Continue Reading…