Archives of “Education” category

rss

US birthrate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020

  
Analysis, Education

In the long term, demographics are everything

In the long term, demographics are everything
The great long-term problem that’s facing nearly every global market is demographic — people are having fewer babies.
Fewer babies means fewer consumers and that’s a major deflationary force. The developed world can supplement that with immigration but the birth rate in the developing world is also falling sharply.
In 2020, the US birthrate fell to 1.64 births per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate and down 4% year-over-year. It’s important to note that the pandemic would have had little effect on the number because almost all babies born in the year would have been in utero before March 2020. However there is early evidence that 2021 will be another decline because December births were down 8% year over year. That’s when babies conceived at the start of the pandemic would have been born. I suspect some of that will reverse coming out of the covid-19 but the longer-term trend is inarguable.
On a gross basis, there were 3,605,201 births in the United States last year, the lowest number since 1979.
Due to the pandemic, the US also had higher deaths in 2021 and 25 states had more deaths than births.
Maybe the most-shocking statistic in the report is that the average age of women at first birth is 27, up from 23 just ten years ago. That’s come with a collapse in teen pregnancy.
Meanwhile, other countries are far worse than the US. In South Korea, the fertility rate is under 1.

Attempting to Time Different Strategies Is Very Difficult

  
Analysis, Education
  • Few strategies outperform all the time, and you should thoroughly understand why and when underperformance is most likely to occur.
  • Value-oriented strategies tend to perform poorly during economic recessions.
  • The first step when a strategy fails is to compare the economic environments in which the strategy failed in the past, and to determine if the current environment is similar.
  • When historical economic precedent can indeed explain the performance of a strategy, then the investor should probably continue using the strategy despite poor short-term performance because attempting to time different strategies can be a very difficult task. Short-term performance is typically very misleading, so the probability is reasonably high that you might give up on a strategy just before it begins to work again.
  • If the economic environment is not one in which the strategy has historically fared poorly, then the next step is to be somewhat introspective. Is it I, the investor, or the strategy that is failing? Simply monitor the performance of the strategy’s entire portfolio versus that of the stocks selected by the investor. If the performance of the stocks is inferior to that of the entire portfolio, then the investor detracted from the strategy’s basic performance.9 simple and effective strategies to sell more - efficy
Go to top