stock market – The Modern Piggy Bank

Trade Like A Quant

Sometimes dubbed the rocket scientists of Wall Street the meaning of quantitative analysts often takes on a broad meaning. Quant is a fairly broad term honestly, but roughly means someone who takes an extremely mathematical approach to the markets. While some quants use Einstein level math there are some practical lessons you can take away to use in your own portfolio.

More than anything quantitative analysts apply a rigid rules based approach to the markets. They have specific buy and sell signals that they adhere to religiously and consistently. This is where their great returns come from(if their algorithms are correct). While some get blamed for things like the flash crash where the DOW dropped 9% in minutes it would be wrong to say that it was the strangest thing to ever happen in market history. A signal for a quant could be something as simple as the 200 day moving average or as complex as analyzing S&P 500 futures contracts volume and expiration and placing an order nanoseconds before the futures expire and pocketing the spread, which is the high frequency trading world.

So how can you apply this? Well a buy and hold strategy sounds great in theory, but its harder to stick to in practice. Sure its easy to say when the market has not had a down year since 2008, but it would have been really hard to hold onto your portfolio is 2008 when the US equity market shed about 40%. If you haven’t experienced a massive drawdown like that imagine draining half of your savings.

So if you are someone who can’t weather massive drawdowns, and we don’t blame you if that is the case, consider taking a rules based approach. It is great to have an investment plan that you can stick to and might even help you sleep better at night. Here is a simple rule to get you to start thinking about what you might want to do:

Apply a short, medium, and long term moving average to your portfolio. When conducting your rebalancing, best done once a year for tax benefits, tilt most towards the assets in upward trend above the moving averages, more towards the one that are not trending as strongly above one or two of the moving averages, and least towards those in a downtrend under the moving averages.

Note: This can be considered a trend following approach and is a popular investment style that may or may not suit you. Over time strategies go in an out of favor so its often wise to pick a strategy that you understand and believe in and stick with it over the long term.

Building wealth takes strong discipline and taking your emotions out of investing by applying rules to a strategy that works can often help mitigate bad decisions.

Don’t Let Trading Fees Eat Your Profits Away

There’s no point to keeping extra expenses in your life, it just weighs you down in the end. Like we said before, a dollar saved is a dollar earned. Get rid of cable and pay for streaming services of what you watch, get a credit card tailored to your most popular purchase category, cook more, etc. There’s a lot that can be done. Your portfolio is a steak, do you want a fatty piece or a lean piece that will marble when its cooked and not char? In today’s day in age, when you’re managing your investments, the same thing can be done.

Traditionally, there were very high broker and platform fees. You’d even pay commissions if you were placing orders for stocks over the phone or online. Fees have gotten lower for discount online brokerages where now instead of commission, platform fees, or managing fees, you’re paying per trade. Sometimes as little as $5 per trade. And while this seems cheap, for most people starting out these trading fees can really add up and significantly decrease your invested capital.

Younger investors in their 20’s and 30’s have flocked to Robinhood which uses Apex Clearing Corp. as their clearing house because it charges $0 in fees overall. It doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles like other online brokerages such as extended trading hours or research but you can upgrade to premarket and after market hours for a minimal sum. You even have the ability to leverage your capital up to 3x which is a nice feature for more experienced investors and people looking to amplify their returns. Quick disclaimer: Leverage trading is highly risky and we do not recommend it.

So now you have an online brokerage that you hooked your bank account to for free. But businesses need to make money and now you’re probably wondering how they make theirs. To keep it simple, they invest your uninvested capital. Don’t worry, your capital is still yours to invest as you wish whenever you wish. It’s also been rumored that they also sell your order flow and trading information to High Frequency Trading firms (HFTs or firms that trade using algorithms). If these rumors are true, they sell this information for a higher premium than your traditional brokers. This shouldn’t change your investing habits unless you are trading large blocks of shares at once.

For us at The Modern Piggy Bank, we use Robinhood for our discretionary accounts and allocate only a fixed percentage towards it after allocating into our other investment accounts like a Roth IRA and 401k’s using more traditional platforms like Fidelity which recently just announced that that they were offering zero fee ETF’s from Ishares in what will be direct competition to Robinhood.

Just know your cost of investing is less than what your father paid, and less than his father. You don’t have the excuse of having hidden costs or that you’re paying fees for x,y, and z. So don’t make excuses when you can make money. We truly do trust Robinhood implicitly when it comes to our money and our accounts. While we would like to see more features added in the future if you see us on our phones, it will most likely be us with the Robinhood app open checking our portfolios.

Welcome To The Modern Piggy Bank

Welcome to The Modern Piggy Bank. Most likely you stumbled across us on your search to save more or make your money work for you. Either way, we’re happy you’re here.

The Modern Piggy Bank is a brand new website with the goal of cutting through all the nonsense that litters the internet of how to utilize your money to minimize your expenses and optimize your savings. You aren’t going to find where to get the best deals on $10 wine here or how to eat Bougie on a budget, what you’re going to find is solid research, tried and true techniques, and our own personal stories.

Most likely, we are just like you. We’re two really good friends that just graduated from Penn State and secured our full time jobs. Mike works in aerospace while I work at a startup. We live in two separate areas of the country now but during our four years in college we worked hard to put our dreams for a successful business into life.

We tried a lot of different ideas in college, a lot that never panned out but what mattered to us was that we were trying. We tried everything from delivering home cooked meals made by neighborhood “moms” to committing arbitrage on Amazon. What really drew us in was investing and that is where our passion lies. I did my internships at an asset management firm with $1.5 billion under management while Mike spent his time building planes and focusing on engineering. Yet we both knew we wanted to focus on investing. Fast forward a couple of years later and we secured our jobs and starting making real money.

We realized pretty quickly that with real money comes real expenses. And so The Modern Piggy Bank was born. The goal of this website is not to sell you some product that an advertiser wants to push. But to actually inform you of your choices as a retail banking client, a retail investor, and an average American who wants to make the most out of their money or as Mike and I constantly remind each other, the goal is to minimize expenses while optimizing savings.

“With real money comes real expenses”- Will Hershon

We love the challenge of investing and the rewards you can get from it and one day hope to have our own fund. But for now, we are working every day to save more, learn more, and invest wisely. I have goals to own real estate, mostly rental properties, and I’m going to document my experiences with that here. Mike wants to figure out better ETF and fund strategies that out perform the current indexes for lower costs.

We both really believe in the firm foundation theory of investing while Mike sometimes branches out in the more technical branches of algorithmic trading, considering his background in engineering, this isn’t surprising.

For now we’re both focusing on filling this website with the best information possible. I’ll be the first to admit we are going to make some mistakes, but we will also be the first people to fix them. We’re learning, just like you are. But we’re willing to share our successes and our mistakes. If we blow our budget on a night out we’re gonna write about how we fixed this in the future. When we buy our first rental property we’re going to write the process and what we looked for. Eventually we’re gonna have our portfolios up for you to see. Our views on investing, and the markets will be here as well.

The Modern Piggy Bank is going to focus on four major categories. Investing, Saving, Passive Income, and Education. Investing as you might have guessed is going to be focused on the markets and real estate. Saving is going to focus on the best ways to save money and the most efficient vehicles for doing so. Passive Income will take a little longer to build out as we believe that’s going to be focused more on maintaining the real estate portion of your portfolio, but I promise you, we will get there. And finally, Education. Education is where we will review and talk about the books we’re reading and the ideas we’re learning about, anything and everything helps when it comes to making smarter decisions with your money.

At The Modern Piggy Bank, we’re not going to give you some advice on how to save more from someone who heard it from someone’s brothers friends old roommate and how they managed to move out of their 500 square foot apartment and upgrade to a luxurious 700 square feet. We are going to give you our actual experiences right from our own lives of how we handle money, grow it, invest it, and save it. You’ll grow with us. No doubt, we will make mistakes at times. But we aren’t claiming to be perfect. We claim to be on a path few choose to actually follow yet all talk about.

Knowing what to do with your money is hard. I get it, and all of us at the Modern Piggy Bank struggle to some degree to save our money and make it go further. That’s why we set this website up. But when you get down to the bottom line, saving money isn’t rocket science (although Mike actually does rocket science).

If you’re looking for ways to shop the best deals on luxury items or make a quick buck by taking surveys online, this isn’t the website for you. There are plenty of great websites out there that will tell you how to do this. We are focused on other things, real ideas, true techniques, anything and everything that will help you grow your wealth and yourself.

Actual experiences right from our own lives

And with all that, welcome to The Modern Piggy Bank.

-Will Hershon

-Mike Andriopoulos