What I'm Doing as an Investor During the Financial Crisis

As the economy has turned south, I've been asked if I think it is a good time to cut back on retirement plan contributions. A friend recently moved all his retirement account investments into bonds. Investors pulled out of mutual funds in September in greater numbers than in any time in the history of the mutual fund industry. What is an investor to do?

I have a long time horizon until retirement, and I can leave my taxable investments in the market for a while. So I am following Warren Buffet's lead and am buying.

I'm doing four things.

1) I'm re-balancing my retirement account to be 100% Equities and increasing my small cap growth and large cap value investments.


I was already 90% invested in equities so this is not a huge change. I moved out of bond funds, which have certainly cushioned the decline in my retirement account. And I'm moving funds from an S&P 500 index fund into Dodge and Cox, a Large Cap Value managed fund. I have many years to go before I retire so even if markets decline further, I think being 100% in equities after 30-40% declines year to date, is a good plan for the long term.

2) I'm increasing my contribution to my employer based retirement plan (see above) from 13% of my salary to 16%. This is also not a huge change, but the more money I can invest while the markets are down significantly, the better.

3) I'm going through my taxable account, and looking for funds that I can sell at a significant loss. I will immediately reinvest in another fund in the same category, as I feel good about the asset allocation in my taxable account. But by selling at a loss and reinvesting, I maintain the same exposure to equities, I have a chance to replace funds that are not performing in line with peers in their categories, and I get to offset the loss against my income come tax day! I'll write a post with details about this soon.

4) I'm looking for cash to invest. Since I'm increasing my retirement contributions, my pay check will decline slightly. I have an emergency fund and though I already live comfortably below my means, there are ways I can cut back and save even more. So I'm looking to see if I can find cash to invest without depleting my emergency fund. More about this soon as well!

Fund of the Week: SWFFX Schwab Financial Services

I first wrote about SWFFX Schwab Financial Services back in December of 2007. Well one of my brothers and I had some IRA cash that needed investing so we decided to put a little money into this fund in April.

This fund gained 6.24% this week which is sweet. It is still down 9.76% since I bought it which is lame.

The other big winner this week was Real Estate.

Bonds, Oil, and some international investments had a bad week with DJP iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index Total Return ETN (Broad Commodities), another fund I first mentioned back in December 08, leading the decline.

Investing My 2007 IRA Contribution

I added my Roth IRA contribution for 2007 at the beginning of the year (you can add an IRA contribution for 2007 any time up until tax day in 2008), but I have not invested it yet. Actually, the Roth IRA I have been tracking in the Portfolio experiment is just mine, but as I mentioned here (see point #3), I manage both my and my wife's IRAs as one:


So I built a portfolio at Morningstar of our combined IRAs and will use it in the weekly portfolio updates going forward:


Last year, I added some international and small and mid cap domestic ETFs to fill in some category gaps.

• VWO Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock ETF -Diversified Emerging Mkts
• EFA iShares MSCI EAFE Index -Foreign Large Blend
• EFV iShares MSCI EAFE Value Index -Foreign Large Value
• VOE Vanguard Mid-Cap Value ETF -Mid-Cap Value
• VB Vanguard Small Cap ETF -Small Blend

As you can see in the image above, VWO was the top performing holding since 5/01/2007 but the other 4 holdings lost money. That's ok though. These are all index funds and they cover broad indexes that I intend to add to over the years. If global markets and small and mid sized American companies have not added value by the time I retire, my IRA will be the least of my concerns.

So the question is, what should I invest in now?

For the most part I feel pretty good about the diversity of different markets, different fund companies, and different styles (managed vs index) that I have picked so far.

I thought about adding a gold fund, MIDSX Midas, last year but opted not to. I was willing to invest in the super hot Emerging Market sector but not also in the super hot gold sector. Well, chasing performance would have paid off, in the short term- MIDSX was up 31% in 2007 and crushed other funds in its category by 8%. I am not sure why Morningstar has it at 2 stars. M* bases its star rating on performance in light of a fund's risk compared to similar investments. This fund has high expenses and is volatile, but over the long term has crushed its competition.


Anyway, I did not invest in a gold fund and with gold over $900 an ounce, I can't bring myself to invest in one now either.

Except that I am interested in adding a commodity fund which may include gold. One option is DBC PowerShares DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund which invests about 10% in gold. DBC is heavily weighted in oil though and I have an Energy fund PRNEX T. Rowe Price New Era that gives me coverage of oil.

I like the sector diversification of DJP iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index Total Return ETN better. I wish it was not an ETN, since investing in an ETN means I have to pay attention to Barclays as a bank. If Barclays goes under, this investment would be worthless. I already invest in a few individual companies. BXP Boston Properties makes up over 7% of my IRA investments and it lost 22% last year so I have a high tolerance for volatility and am already tracking individual companies so this is not a problem, just not ideal.

The other sector I am considering is the financial sector. As hammered as it has been with the sub-prime mess, I'm tempted to invest with the hope that I am picking up a lot of solid companies at good prices. Doing some analysis makes me think twice. The second largest holding I have in my IRA is DVY iShares Dow Jones Select Dividend Index and 50% of that holding is invested in domestic financial companies. The Financial ETF I am interested in is IXG iShares S&P Global Financials which is over 60% invested in foreign companies. The truth is that the fund EFV iShares MSCI EAFE Value Index that I bought last year is over 40% invested in foreign financial companies so I already have exposure there as well.

Since I already have a large stake in DVY, the simplest way to increase my exposure to financial companies is to increase my position in EFV instead of adding yet another fund.

After thinking about all this a bit and doing some research, what I think I am going to do is add a commodity investment (an ETN is not a 'fund'), and then increase my smaller positions that performed poorly last year.

I have my contribution for 2007 plus cash that has accumulated in the accounts from dividends and capital gains distributions. What complicates things is that I only have a specific amount of cash in each account so the amount I can add to each holding depends on which account the cash is in and since I do not want the same holding in two different accounts, which IRA the ETF is already in as well. It is a little complicated, but not rocket science. Here are the investments I will add to and the percentage of the cash I have available I will add to each:

• DJP iPath Commodity Index Total Return ETN- Broad Commodities 30%
• EFV iShares MSCI EAFE Value Index -Foreign Large Value 20%
• EFA iShares MSCI EAFE Index -Foreign Large Blend 10%
• VOE Vanguard Mid-Cap Value ETF -Mid-Cap Value 25%
• VB Vanguard Small Cap ETF -Small Blend 15%

And if I do this, here is what the big picture will look like:

My Brokerage and My Roth IRA

Recent comments on my blog inspired me to think about whether I recommend the investment strategy I am using for the investment portfolio experiment I have been working on for about a year.

A simple question that came up as I thought about that is, should I follow this strategy? I started investing in my brokerage account back in 1994. One day I'll tell that story -how I first got burned by a bank, then by Janus (which really means I burned myself!). That story explains a lot about how I but this strategy together.

But for now, I am going to add my investment accounts to the 'competition' so I can compare them to the hypothetical accounts I have been tracking. I do not follow this strategy exactly, but if a hypothetical portfolio blows my accounts away, I want to know about it!

Below are the holdings in my brokerage account and my IRA. I went back and determined the value of all holdings on May 1st and used the value of each holding on that date for the views below. So the Gain/Loss since purchase is the Gain/Loss since May 1st, not since I actually purchased them. This is so I can easily compare them to the hypothetical portfolios.

Click image for a larger view:



I bought Best Buy back in the 90's and it is up over 130% since then. Too bad I only invested in a few shares! I bought Janus Enterprise on March 6th, 2000. Allow me do demonstrate what a train wreck that's been:

You've got to be impressed with my timing!

When I post the update for this past week, I'll include these accounts in the mix. You'll see I've learned a thing or two. Over the years I held on to JAENX and added to it as it struggled and diversified beyond Janus. Both year to date and since May, my Brokerage has beat the index and ETF portfolios despite the fact that one of my largest holdings is BXP which is down over 5% since May and down for the year as well!

Retire in your 40s, no problem!

A friend directed me to an article about retiring in your 40s and talked about how extreme the stories were. I read the article and found the strategies far from extreme!

• Cook cheap meals at home.
• Drive an economy car.
• Find affordable housing, even in expensive cities.
• Don't run the AC all the time.
• Don't spend more as your income rises.
• Live on as little as 25%-50% of your income.

A great quote from the article is:

"I would walk into (a work social event) in my $60 thrift-store gown and my $10 Payless shoes and I would feel like an actual millionaire, because I was..."

So are these strategies extreme?

Cook cheap meals at home. I've already written about tips for saving big time on food costs.

Drive an economy car. I drive a Civic Hybrid. We did buy it new, which was not frugal, but used hybrids were going for close to new prices if you could actually find one. We wanted one so we bit the bullet. We would have spent more money taking the commuter rail than we paid for the car and gas for the 80,000 miles we have put on it and maintenance since 2003, so not only do I enjoy it, it has been a very good deal for us.

Find affordable housing, even in expensive cities. When I got married, my wife and I moved from an expensive apartment near Cambridge to a home outside the city. The mortgage/insurance/real estate tax total was more than our rent, but not by much. After the tax write-off for our mortgage, which was more than the rent write-off that Massachusetts actually does allow, our housing costs were about the same. Rather than buy a more expensive home which our combined incomes would have allowed, we kept our housing costs low and doubled up on payments. After a couple of years we were able to refinance for a 30 year fixed loan at no points at 5.375%. Even with the subsequent spike in real estate taxes that naturally followed the reduction in federal taxes and thus a reduction in state and local tax revenue, our housing costs remain in line with what our rent would have been and we have built equity.

Don't run the AC all the time. We don't own an air conditioning unit. There are a few nights a year that this is not comfortable, but we survive.

Don't spend more as your income rises. Of course nobody wants to just scrape by and if your first salary is not great, you are going to increase your spending as you earn more. But it is up to you and your circumstance how much you increase your spending and if you are frugally minded, you will find that over time you can do more with less. So you can actually do more without increasing your overall expenses. If you lived just fine on your salary 10 years ago and work smart and get promotions, your income should be higher than what you needed to live on back then. Only you can assess if you can you get by on 25-50% of what you earn, but be honest!

I'm going with not extreme on these strategies. Sure I would not make some of the other choices discussed in the article, but I do other things not mentioned. Not buying cable saves me hundreds of dollars a year. Some call that extreme! I'll reevaluate it in my 40s...

How Many Mutual Funds is Too Many?

Some folks over on Morningstar's discussion board tossed around the question:

"How Many Mutual Funds is Too Many?"

My answer is, "It depends."

“On what?” you might ask.

Well, a number of things.

Let's explore!

I have almost 60 funds. I can safely say, that is a ridiculous amount, but I don't mind. That brings me to point one.

1) If you don't mind how many you have, you don't have too many.

If you can't keep track of the funds, or feel overwhelmed when trying to manage your investments, you have too many. My tolerance for spending time keeping track of my funds is very likely higher than average, as evidenced by the fact that I write a blog about it. I do not recommend, doing what I do, to anyone else.

I find tools like Yodlee and Morningstar's free portfolio tool as well as the interface in each of the accounts I hold the funds in, makes it pretty manageable, for me. This brings me to my next point.

2) You need enough to achieve your goals for the money in each investment account.

My wife and I both work and we both have employer sponsored retirement plans and IRAs and we share a brokerage account. Our situation is not a-typical and that adds up to 5 accounts. Not all five are with the same brokerage and that means that funds available in some accounts are not available in others. Since the retirement accounts will remain invested until we retire and we are many years away from that, the funds best suited for very long term growth are not always the same as what we choose in our non-retirement account as we hope to use funds in that account before retirement (which is the reason we have it). Furthermore, we likely won’t tap the Roth IRAs at the same time as the 403(b)s depending on our tax situation at the time. Given all that, I choose to balance (Stock vs bond, Large Cap vs Small Cap, Domestic vs International, etc.) each of the five accounts as independent accounts. That way, as we access them at different times, I won’t have to re-balance one account because I drew down on another.

3) You need enough to attain diversity in fund companies.

I like to pick funds from different fund companies (Janus, Bridgeway, Artisan, T. Rowe Price, etc.) on top of picking funds that cover different categories (Large Cap Growth, Intermediate Term Bonds, Real Estate, Small Cap Foreign, etc.) A fund company might cover different categories, but they have one corporate culture and a pool of analysts who all work in the same environment, so there can be serious overlap in the companies that their analysts are recommending to their fund managers. Also, no one fund company has all the best managers in every category. When I picked the 20 funds for my hypothetical portfolio through Etrade, I ended up with a wide mix of fund companies without really trying.

4) You may end up with more than you need, depending on your employment history.

My employer used to allow me to use Janus for my 403(b) contributions so I had a portfolio of Janus funds. Then we switched to a company that picks top funds in each category regardless of fund company. I gladly signed up with the new, more diverse program, but I left my investments at Janus instead of rolling them over. Janus is strongly growth oriented overall and I liked having an investment at a pretty young age in a more aggressive portfolio than the new plan offers. This means I have 2 403(b)s with 8 funds at Janus and 12 in the other account. Our IRAs are held at Etrade and I cannot buy most of the funds available to me through my non-Janus 403(b) even if I wanted too. I do not want to add more in Janus funds for retirement so I am left looking for alternatives. Typically each year as I contribute to my IRA, I look for categories that I am not invested in that have been lagging, and then pick a good fund or ETF with a low minimum purchase amount (for funds) so I can diversify as much as possible. Having done this for several years and finding options that let you invest relatively small amounts, I have 14 funds in my IRA.

5) You need enough to diversify across sectors and/or categories.

You’ve heard the advice: “Invest in stocks and bonds.” And certainly you can buy a couple of index funds that broadly cover the stock and bond markets. Throw in a broad international index fund for good measure and you are pretty darn diversified with very little effort or upkeep. That approach may well be ‘enough’ to diversify across sectors. But if you want to invest systemically and try and follow a strategy of investing in categories that are down, presumably in the short term, you will need to pinpoint more specific categories or sectors. Real estate, small cap value, financial services, and precious metals have all struggled lately. To invest in these specifically you need to own funds that have these categories as their focus. How detailed you want to get will depend on your tolerance, your interest and your goals. The more detailed you get the more funds you probably need. For example, you probably would not want a portfolio of just the four sectors above unless you like to gamble.

6) You may not need any, if you have enough time and money to diversify in individual companies.

Mutual funds aren't for everyone. If I had enough money to invest in enough individual companies to feel adequately diverse (I kinda obsess over diversity so it would take a lot) and I had the time and expertise to stay on top of each company's performance and prospects, I might forgo funds and choose another path. Afterall, why pay fund managers year after year to do what you can do yourself!

7) If your time horizon is short, one may be too many.

If your time horizon is short, mutual funds or ETFs are probably not the best place for your savings. Note that portfolios of 20 funds spread across 20 sectors, 20 ETFs invested likewise and even the simple three index fund approach all lost money since May... with the 20 ETF portfolio down over 4%! Of course if you choose a money market fund, that might do well...

In summary, don’t invest in more funds than you can manage, but don’t avoid investing in a fund that interests you, if investing in it would help you meet your goals.

Recap- things to consider when trying to decide how many mutual funds is enough:

1. If you don't mind how many you have, you don't have too many.
2. You need enough to achieve your goals for the money in each investment account.
3. You need enough to attain diversity in fund companies.
4. You may end up with more than you need, depending on your employment history.
5. You need enough to diversify across sectors and/or categories.
6. You may not need any, if you have enough time and money to invest in individual companies.
7. If your time horizon is short, one may be too many.

So long TIAA CREF!

My employer offers two different companies for retirement investing. I originally signed up for TIAA/CREF as they had a Real Estate option and the other company (Invesmart) did not.

I allocated a more than advisable percentage of my savings into the Real Estate offering for several years and did pretty well with that. I am switching out of TIAA CREF and into Invesmart which means no more Real Estate option. Even though Real Estate is not likely to do as well as it has over the last few years, I am still bummed I won't have the option. But overall, I think Invesmart is a better choice.

I think both the plans my employer offers are ok, but there are two reasons I am switching.

1. The plan available to me through TIAA/CREF invests in annuities in a 403(b). These are not mutual funds so I cannot research the holdings on morningstar. I cannot compare them to other 'funds' in the same categories. I can go here and assess performance, but I cannot compare each holding, side by side with the competition.
2. The main reason I am switching is that the options through Invesmart are, for the most part, better (once one goes through the tedium of trying to compare the two). Invesmart picks top mutual funds in each category and offers that fund. If a fund falls off the wagon they replace it with a better performing fund in the same category.

IRA Rollovers and Roth IRAs

Sue Stevens finished her series of articles on IRAs and talked about Rollover IRAs and I learned something new! I had no idea that legislation was passed to allow people to take 401(k)s or 403(b)s and roll them directly into a Roth IRA- starting in 2008. I have 403(b) money in an old account and have pondered rolling it into an IRA and then converting that to a Roth, but that always seemed like a hassle- so I am interested to find out more about this.

Basically if you have a 401(k) or 403(b) plan and leave the company you are contributing to the plan through, you usually have three options.

1. Cash it out and pay penalties and taxes (don't do it).
2. Stop contributing, but leave it alone (some 401(k)s may not allow this)
   
3. Roll it into a rollover (traditional) IRA and as of 2008, into a rollover (Roth) IRA
   

The other thing she mentions is that IRAs and 401/3(kb)s have different dates at which you can begin to take money out without penalty. You can take penalty free distributions from a Traditional or Roth IRA at 59 1/2 but you may be able to make withdrawals from a 401(k) or 403(b) at age 55 if you no longer work at the company you funded the account through.

There are other factors to consider when making this decision- but direct to Roth rollovers and thinking about access before 59 1/2 are good issues to be aware of.

Nice explanation of Traditional and Roth IRAs

Sue Stevens over at Morningstar has an easy to understand and very thorough overview of everything you should know about Roth IRAs. This includes more obscure options for claiming a loss, and good lists of how to make early withdrawals without penalty and without owing taxes.

She also did an overview of traditional IRAs and is planning to do an overview of rollover IRAs.

IRA investing for 2006

When it comes to investing in my IRA every year, I procrastinate. So I am in the process of contributing for tax year 2006- you can contribute to an IRA up until tax day for that year- so I can contribute up to $4000 anytime before April 15th. Actually in Massachusetts, I have until the 17th because of the timing of patriots day. I am not sure how this works exactly- does your brokerage have to receive the deposit before the 15th/17th? Or does the deposit need to be initiated? Will my brokerage accept a deposit on Patriots Day? I am a procrastinator, but I am also too lazy to figure out the details so I will not wait until the last minute, I will contribute now and not worry about it.

And while I procrastinate about pulling together the money to put into an IRA account, I do not put off investing the contribution since I am never going to build a sweet retirement for myself with all my retirement funds sitting in cash.

Also, several people have asked me recently what I recommend investing in. I do not feel comfortable recommending specific investments for specific moments in time. So instead, I will share what I am planning to do. I do not recommend buying the same things I plan to buy since I am buying them specifically to balance against what I already own. But I feel good about all the holdings I am hanging on to after I rebalance and am happy to share my choices if it helps others learn about some of the options out there...

I have more than one IRA and when I contribute each year, I try to look at them all at once to see what I am invested in and what to change to keep a diverse balance. I do this by copying all the holdings from each IRA into a spreadsheet and look up the current category for each holding on Morningstar, Here are the combined investments, organized by category and listing each specific holding and the overall percentage each holding represents:


Three things stand out right away:

• Almost half of the investments are in large domestic companies
• There is very little invested in foreign companies
• I have several very small positions in a number of Janus mutual funds.

I also notice that most of my large domestic investments are in index tracking securities and everything outside of this category is in funds with managers trying to beat their respective indexes.

So as I decide what to invest my 2006 contribution in, I aim to:

• Reduce my percentage investment in large US companies
• Increase my investments in overseas companies
• Clean up some of the clutter
• Diversify between index tracking securities and actively managed funds across more categories

This may sound complicated and expensive, but it really isn’t. Here is exactly what I aim to do:

• Sell my positions in JAGLX, JAGTX, JAMRX, and JAWWX (which has lagged its peers) to clean up the clutter.
• Add to my investment in JAGIX to add a little more active management to the investments in large US companies.
• Invest in VWO, EFA, and EFV all foreign index funds both increasing my international exposure and balancing against the actively managed foreign fund I already own.
• Invest in MIDSX to slightly increase my specialty interests.
• Invest in VBK, VB and VOE to increase my smaller company investments and again balance against the actively managed funds I already own.

Here is what my new IRA portfolio will look like:


Now I have more coverage of mid/small sized companies. I have managed funds and index funds, across many categories, No individual investment is smaller than 2% and the largest single position I have is 13% down from 15%. And I have more international and specialty coverage offering more diversity from the large US focus I had before.

Also I am more diversified across fund companies. I think this is important because even when different funds at the same company focus on different sectors, it is often the same pool of analysts or same analyst strategy that is informing the various fund managers. Also, as companies struggle or do evil things, using a variety of companies reduces risk from these things as well.

So now I have holdings from Janus, Vanguard, Fidelity, Artisan, T Rowe Price, iShares, Columbia, State Street Bank (they manage SPY), American Century, Wells Fargo, and Stratton and Boston Properties.

All this diversity- across sectors (company size and growth vs value), strategies (index vs managed), and companies should mean that I am exposed to less risk in general but am still positioned to make gains if any for these sectors due well.

So how much will it cost? All my IRAs are with etrade and have no account fees. All the mutual funds I am buying and selling are no-load, no-fee funds so no costs there either. My pricing for buying ETFs through etrade is $7.99 per transaction so the grand total I will pay is $47.94. I will post when I actually execute this plan.

Saving for retirement vs saving for pre-retirement

Walter Updegrave at cnnmoney posted an excellent explanation of a good strategy for how to approach where to put your savings for retirement. And for those of us who work for non-profits, 403(b)s should be approached like he recommends approaching 401(k)s: contribute enough to earn your full employer's match (if any), fund a Roth IRA if you are eligible, then ad more to your 403(b).

Combining this with the typical financial planning advice- "Pay off your credit card debt first" one can come up with a guide for how to manage one's finances, but it gets a little more complicated when faced with decisions about and how much to save in non-retirement accounts. (Not to mention what debt to pay off- Credit Card debt is obvious because the interest is usually high but College debt and Mortgages are worth exploring, but not in this post.)

Walter says max out both your IRA and 401/3/k/b- and then contribute to a non-retirement account. To do this, however, you must be saving over $19,500 ($15,500+$4000). And he was addressing this to a married couple so they would have to save $39,000 a year before funding a non-retirement account. I do not believe Walter is really recommending this- he is trying to explain a way to think about retirement accounts that I agree with completely- Match your 401/3, then fund a Roth. But after that- at what point should you start saving for retirement?

Let's face it, most of us want some wealth before we reach our 60s and I am betting that by the time I reach 60 the retirement age for social security at least, will be higher than it is now.

So does it make sense to invest in a non-retirement account before maxing out your 401(k)? One thing to think about is how much retirement savings you have already and how much you are on track to have when you reach your 60s but lets look at the numbers. Say your employer matches 3% and you make around $40,000. That would mean you employer would match up to $1200 so you need to contribute that much to get the match. The maximum for an IRA is $4000, so you need to save $5200 to end up with $6400 in retirement savings for the year.

Using CNN's savings calculator which uses a high rate of return at 9%- if you are 30 and save this much until 65, you will end up with $1,380,548.83. Before you get too excited, adjusted for an assumed 3% rate of inflation, that is only equal to $475,403.62 in today's dollars- hardly enough to cover 35 years of wild and crazy retirement adventures.

But, if you contribute more each year, as you earn more and your employer matches more and IRA limits increase, you can make headway. (Notice I don't bother to include Social Security estimates- I'm a bit of a pessimist about that one). Regardless, you can use a simple calculator like this to put in your actual age and actual income and adjust the numbers to figure out how much you want to and can contribute to your retirement savings.

Lets assume for our example $5200 is enough and do-able. This comes out to about $433 per month. If you can save an additional $300 per month then you could buy three mutual funds and contribute $100 to each, every month and build up a nice non-retirement fund. Of course you will need to save up the initial minimum for each fun which for the funds we are looking at here range from $0 to $2500.

If the market does well and your Non-Retirment portfolio swells, you can tap into it to buy a home, a trip to Iceland, a diamond studded cell phone, start a charity, etc. before you turn 65. Maybe another way to think about it is: are the things you want to buy with your savings worth what you would need to do now to save that much... Saving $733 a month ends up being about $212 dollars per week.. Cancel cable, make your lunches at home and see if you can pull it off (or not if you decide you do not need that diamond studded cell phone after all).

Social Security

In response to this article about the US going bankrupt, I commented on Social Security including crazy ideas like rolling back the retirement age and giving all my 'projected' payments away.

I was discussing this with a friend over a frosty pint later on and he almost took his empty glass and wacked me over the head with it in a well-meaning attempt to knock some sense into me.

Anybody else want to buy me a pint o' cider and discuss?