MFA investment March 2025

Investing in recycling

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

[You know as well as I do, but just to flag it again….

Per the New York Times:

“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, “the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.”

On a separate but related note, my younger brother is disabled and lives on Social Security.

In light of all this, and especially after reading Paul Krugman’s alarming “Smears, Sadism, and Social Security: Why Elon Musk wants to make seniors suffer,” I am asking everyone reading to please make those 5 calls.]

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Fact 1: Investing passively in the S&P 500 or some comparable fund—with all of its attendant investments in the fossil fuel industry, in tanks and jets and missiles that the United States government sells to murderous authoritarians like Mohammed Bin Salman, and in the tech billionaires who seem eager to sell out humanity to robots—would have made more money than the MFA portfolio since the latter’s inception in January 2024.

Fact 2: That said, in 2025, we are beating the S&P by over 6% year-to-date. If we were professional money managers, we maybe would have been fired last year. But this year? We’d be getting a raise.

What can I say? As previously noted, 2024’s stock-market boom was all about Artificial Intelligence, and because here at Money for Artists we seek to live in a world in which, among other things, real human artists make their own weird human stuff and it has the sheen and the sweat and the dirt of the human all over it, I would call us opposed. Hence, the MFA portfolio doesn’t traffic in AI, just as it tries not to traffic in wickedness in general.

Also, who cares? The point is to sustainably invest money for old age and retirement. The point is not to try to beat the market (even though, again, we are). The financial writer Jason Zweig tells a story somewhere about interviewing older folks in ritzy retirement communities in Boca Raton. He asked them if their retirement portfolios had beaten the market or not. Some percentage of them knew, some percentage didn’t know, but the point of the story was the guy who responded with something like “Who the hell cares? All I know is it was enough for me to retire to Boca!”

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