Meet Elizabeth. We met her six months ago as she had just signed up for Global Predictions. She was already on her way to being more in control of her investments but was looking to understand her current portfolio better and make better decisions on what she was investing in.
Elizabeth is in her early 30s and lives in the Seattle area, where she just purchased a condo in 2019. Since graduation, she has worked as a strategy consultant at a large consulting firm. She fell in love with helping her clients adapt to big changes in their respective industries. For her, it was a perfect mix of creative thinking grounded in data.
Alongside making 401k contributions, Elizabeth started to get promoted and experience more discretionary income and started to make contributions to an IRA. After about a year of contributions, she realized the money was just sitting in the account without earning much of a return.
While wary of investing it all in one place, she started to dabble with buying stocks in companies she understood, but she knew from all her research there was more than just picking companies you like. She turned to the Passive Investing for Left Field podcast and websites such as Investopedia and learned she should be buying index funds and diversifying. By mid-2019, she had finally invested all of her IRA contributions into a few funds.
Hello, Spring 2020! Just like the rest of us, Elizabeth was working from home during the pandemic and still watching CNBC every morning. She saw how the markets were taking a hit and knew her investments must have too. She opened up her portfolio and realized she wasn’t immune to what was happening.
Elizabeth had learned a lot from her IRA mishap and from dabbling in the stock market during the pandemic, but as she had put more money into the market, she knew that something like the pandemic could happen again and wanted to protect her investments and make money.
When searching for guidance online regarding investment strategies and risk, she discovered Global Predictions. With a condo, a 401k, an IRA, and her individual investment account, it was enticing to see all of her assets in one place. Being free to sign up didn’t hurt, either.
After connecting her investment accounts and inputting assets like her condo and cash, she immediately started to see that while she had made some great choices in owning real estate and investing in a variety of diverse index funds, she had some areas for improvement.
Global Predictions helped her understand how well she had set up her entire portfolio by having a Portfolio Score, which considers three components, including how her investments matched with her entire portfolio's risk-adjusted returns and how well she was protected in case of a downturn.
Global Predictions took into account all of her assets to analyze how her portfolio measured against those three components and provided automated recommendations to help improve her entire portfolio.
The top recommendations that helped improve her Downside Protection Score were to sell ARKK and ABNB shares and use that cash to invest in a gold fund and broad-based commodities ETF. Elizabeth appreciated these recommendations and improved her score without sacrificing expected returns or reducing her risk match. After applying these to her portfolio, she still had the same risk-adjusted returns but now was more protected against large market drops.
When we checked in on her recently after first meeting her in early 2022, we asked her if she was still using Global Predictions and what had been most helpful for her. She said,
“I would have lost a lot of money without Global Predictions. I could only get so far with what I had researched on my own. Now that I have invested more in the market, I want to ensure I am protected against potential downturns without spending an enormous amount of time. I look at my portfolio monthly and make a few adjustments to ensure I’m continually optimizing my portfolio. Global Predictions made me think about more than just my public market investments; also about how all of my assets were a part of my portfolio, like my condo. Seeing everything I have in one place and knowing they take all of that into account allows me to rely on their insights when giving me recommendations.”
