If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself.
That's a mortgage. Most people use it to pay for the house itself, but you are free to use the money in other ways if you already own the house. It's probably the only leveraged asset many people own, and the interest rate isn't particularly low at the moment, but it's the same thing as getting, say, a line of credit against your yacht.
It's called a secured loan. And a house secured loan (aka mortgage) isn't as good as a stock secured loan.
Stock secured loans rates were basically zero for quite a few years. I think this is why all the venture capital suddenly dried up. Both owning a stock AND taking out a loan based on that stock at 0.25% APR is an insane deal. A year of interest on a million dollars is $2,500. And the stock you're holding will outperform that. After a few years you just sell a bit of the stock to continue paying the interest of the loan.
Now that the interest rates are 6-7% things are different. Suddenly your yearly payment on that million dollar loan is $65,000 instead of $2,500. And your stock may not make 6% this year to pay for it.
It's kind of a miracle this return to reality didn't cause more of a collapse.
I agree that mortgage rates didn't drop to that level, but the same sort of trick worked on them. House prices were rising at anything up to 10% per annum, well above the mortgage rate, so you could refinance regularly, probably reduce your Loan to Value level, and also free up more capital to pay off the upcomming interest payments.
As you say, these methods have pretty much stopped working as the growth and interest figures have flipped. I don't see much of a risk of a true market collapse though as there are simply too many powerful people and institutions with too much to lose if that happened. It could be rather turbulent for the rest of us though.
That's a mortgage. Most people use it to pay for the house itself, but you are free to use the money in other ways if you already own the house. It's probably the only leveraged asset many people own, and the interest rate isn't particularly low at the moment, but it's the same thing as getting, say, a line of credit against your yacht.
It's called a secured loan. And a house secured loan (aka mortgage) isn't as good as a stock secured loan.
Stock secured loans rates were basically zero for quite a few years. I think this is why all the venture capital suddenly dried up. Both owning a stock AND taking out a loan based on that stock at 0.25% APR is an insane deal. A year of interest on a million dollars is $2,500. And the stock you're holding will outperform that. After a few years you just sell a bit of the stock to continue paying the interest of the loan.
Now that the interest rates are 6-7% things are different. Suddenly your yearly payment on that million dollar loan is $65,000 instead of $2,500. And your stock may not make 6% this year to pay for it.
It's kind of a miracle this return to reality didn't cause more of a collapse.
I agree that mortgage rates didn't drop to that level, but the same sort of trick worked on them. House prices were rising at anything up to 10% per annum, well above the mortgage rate, so you could refinance regularly, probably reduce your Loan to Value level, and also free up more capital to pay off the upcomming interest payments.
As you say, these methods have pretty much stopped working as the growth and interest figures have flipped. I don't see much of a risk of a true market collapse though as there are simply too many powerful people and institutions with too much to lose if that happened. It could be rather turbulent for the rest of us though.