I bought some SPY and VTI last week. Should have waited till this week but in 20 years I don’t think I will care too much. I am adding $1k a month to my 401k and have an automatic transfer of $250 going to my brokerage each month as well. I am mostly just adding SPY at the moment just because I don’t feel like I have time to dive into any specific company as far as staying on top of financial results. It is balancing act for me as I could increase my monthly contributions but I am torn between doing home renovations (just put grass in the backyard for the kids to play in), investing more, and paying off some limited debt (home and wife’s car).
That's really good @Jwalker! If the house and car are on a low interest rate I would just ride them out. My house is on a 6.5% so I throw an extra $500 at it every month. I will eventually throw a lump sum at it but for now I'd rather have the money invested. I sold out of PLTR in my brokerage and put it in HWM and NVDA. Too soon to tell if that was a good move or bad. I will own PLTR in the future. Our HSA changed providers this year so now I can hold individual stocks. So that went from all S&P to S&P, VGT, NVDA, HWM & PLTR. So I still have some exposure to PLTR just not in my taxable account. The account just moved over right before this recent down turn so the timing could not have been worse... Hopefully just short term noise that irons out over the long term. Well we all know it's going to get alot worse before it gets better so I guess we will just ride it out.
Wow! Not looking much better out there today, guys. NVDA getting hammered. Wish I had some cash lying around to buy more. I'd love to buy Tesla too.
I've lived through much worse. It's how it goes. As long as I keep seeing higher lows I don't get too concerned. The one benefit to stock picking with WXYZ's ideologies is that when things are bad you can ask yourself a few simple questions and decide if you need to buy sell or hold. Did anything change with the underlying principals of the company? Did anything change in their operating environment that forces the way they need to operate? Are they deviating from the vision? Trump came in guns blazing and people are over reacting to all the tariff threats. I'd prefer this rip the bandaid off approach vs dragging out nonsense and ignoring the actual problems for 4 years like the last guy. Like an old western duel, once the dust clears we will see who's still standing.
Good comments above......to use modern style terminology.......investing people. Good to see that everyone that is posting is taking this little....CORRECTION....pretty much in stride. I dont care what the percentage is.....I am calling this a CORRECTION. My view in that we have been in a semi-correction for most of this year....even if we were NOT down by 10% or more. Like all corrections it will simply have to run its course. We will probably continue in this general environment till at least first quarter earnings.....which will start in about 5 or 6 weeks. AND.....as usual sooner or later prices will get so attractive that no one will be able to resist buying the greatest businesses in the world at bargain basement levels. YES.....we are still in a BULL MARKET and at this point we are NOT in a recession.....it is not unusual to have corrections while in a bull market. At least on here we all have each other for support and feedback. That is a good purpose of this thread.
I like this little article....I think to a large degree the markets now drive the economy....not the other way around. Where the Stock Market Goes, the US Economy Will Follow America’s wealthiest households are driving economic growth, thanks to their investing gains. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...w5jk9vNOXGs-fDKXrmhdA&leadSource=uverify wall
I do think there is some politics involved with the FED right now. As i said some posts back....if we end up in a recession over the next 6-12 months it will be due to the FED.
Some good lessons and advice here. It's OK to have emotions — just don't let them near your stock portfolio https://www.tker.co/p/stock-market-performance-after-down-days (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "When the stock market falls more than 1% in a day or a couple percentage points over a couple of days, I always get the feeling that it’s the beginning of a much bigger sell-off. This has been consistent in my 19 years of writing about stocks. To be fair, it’s a rational feeling to have because stock market history is riddled with big, lengthy sell-offs. And you can be sure there’ll be big sell-offs, including bear markets, in the years to come. That said, something that has changed over the years is my growing familiarity with the data, which has made me a better investor less prone to making emotionally-driven adjustments to my portfolio. Just last week, I learned something fascinating from a Bespoke Investment Group blog post: Emotions and investing don’t mix. Emotional investors tend to sell when the market is going down and buy when the market is going up. They should be doing the opposite. As shown below, if you only owned the U.S. stock market on the day after up days since SPY began trading in 1993, your cumulative gain would be just 44%. If you only owned the market on the day after down days, you’d be up 851%! The chart is stupefying. “Emotions and investing don’t mix.” (Source: Bespoke) Sure, buy-and-hold clearly dominates. And owning only on the days after up days still came with a positive return. But owning only on the days after declines — which are the days many investors usually feel less bullish — have produced returns that eclipse owning only on days after up days. Mind your daily news intake We’ve already talked about how the best days in the stock market come at the worst times. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how strong the returns were if you had only held on the day after all of the down days. This is helpful to know, especially since the odds of a down day in the stock market are relatively high at 47%. This is is why the stock market gets so much negative daily news coverage. If we only got stock market news monthly, quarterly, or annually, the odds of seeing positive stories would be much higher. And before you think about overhauling your investment process to only own the day after down days, keep in mind that buy-and-hold was still the winning strategy. (By the way, this whole discussion is similar to what we know about how the stock market performs under various presidents. You might assume the stock market outperforms when a Republican sits in the Oval Office. In fact, the opposite is true: The market outperforms slightly when a Democrat is president. But again, owning stocks only when a certain party occupies the White House has been a mistake. Returns have been multitudes higher when you’ve held stocks through both Republican and Democrat presidencies.) Preparing for worse doesn’t mean dumping stocks Make no mistake. We very well could be on the precipice of a bigger pullback. The S&P 500 has historically experienced an intra-year max drawdown of 14%. From Feb. 19’s high of 6,147, the index fell 5% to a low of 5,837 on Friday. It would have to fall to 5,286 for that average move. That’s an 11% decline from Friday’s close. That said, it’s also likely that we don’t experience a decline of that magnitude in the near-term — the stock market usually goes up. Even if we were near some top, it’s incredibly difficult to time buys and sells to make trading the top make sense. All that is to say that the best strategy for long-term investors is to hold and stand fast through what could be a big downturn. As they say, time in the market beats timing the market. Investing in the stock market is an unpleasant process. The best you can do is to have clear goals and a thoughtful strategy based on your needs and timeline. And from there, you just keep your stock market seatbelts fastened." MY COMMENT Emotions are the killer of investing results. Personally I have now.....quickly.... passed through the various stages of the emotions of a down market and have come out the other side. NOW.....each day I just sit and read and ignore it all. If anything........ I have now reached the point of just thinking that all the WHINING and GNASHING OF TEETH in the media and elsewhere every day is just FUNNY and SILLY.
I have not completed my scanning of the media today.....but so far am seeing nothing. Everything is hindsight analysis.....why "this" fell yesterday.....or...what "that" happened......BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. The other half of what I am seeing is the usual....opinion based and unsupported fear-mongering.
LOL....I just heard on TV that the DOS, NASDAQ nd SP500 are now ALL negative for the year. In addition the NASDAQ is not oficially in a correction. I have one comment......DUH.
It is nice to be "perfect". I am "perfect" today.....not a single stock in the green. One good think about a correction....it cleans out the markets. It shakes out all the speculators and market timers.....and others that really should not be invested in stocks and funds. AND....every correction sets up the next leg of the bull market. It is a normal and necessary part of the markets. You have to ENDURE the pain....to get the future gain.
That is about it for me so far today. I dont care to dwell on the negative and post a bunch of BS articles about any of the "stuff" that is dominating the media right now. if I run into anything that is good....I will post it....otherwise I will simply IGNORE it all.
One very nice little "thing" I notice today that I dont see generally mentioned anywhere......the Ten Year Yield is now DOWN to......4.146%. An amazing drop from a few weeks ago. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y
Some good comments by everyone regarding this little spell we seem to be under at the moment. I have just kept to my normal contributions, so I have bought a few shares in the broad market index as I normally would anyway. I do have a decent little stash in some money market that I could deploy. I have thought a bit about it recently, but I may hold off and see if we get a broader discount going on. As mentioned the broader market is just a touch in the red YTD, so nothing significant by any means....at least yet.
All in all.....a very good close for me today. My account was pulled to a low-medium gain today by only four of my nine stocks....GOOGL, NVDA, PLTR, and MSFT. ALL are GREAT companies. I lso got in a nice beat on the SP500 today by.......1.62%. OK.....on to....HUMP-DAY.
The political content in the financial media is WAY out of control right now. No wonder we are seeing a semi-correction. They have everyone focused on meaningless BS that has nothing to do with business or investing.
As to the FED.....I have been saying this same thing lately. You can just...."feel it.....as the FED sits and watches and does nothing as most of the recent economic data points are pointing down recently. As I have said on here......I think the FED is playing a little bit of politics right now. Parts of US Treasury market show concern about Fed rate-cutting pause https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parts-us-treasury-market-show-195540489.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "NEW YORK (Reuters) - Parts of the U.S. Treasury yield curve are reflecting increasing concerns that the Federal Reserve will wait too long before resuming interest rate cuts as economic growth slows. That will draw even more focus to February’s jobs data, due on Friday, for signals on whether the economy is cooling faster than the U.S. central bank has anticipated. The spread between yields of two-year and five-year notes is trading at around 3 basis points after very briefly turning negative last week for the first time since mid-December. This part of the curve is worth watching because durable inversions have preceded major economic contractions and stock market declines for the past 35 to 40 years, said Tom Fitzpatrick, head of global market insights at R.J. O'Brien. “You've got to pay attention to this curve again because it never got it wrong.” These inversions occurred in 1989, 2000 and 2006, in each case preceding a recession. The curve also inverted in 2019, before a short economic downturn in 2020, though in this instance the Fed was quick to cut rates in 2020 to tackle economic disruption from COVID- related closures. Another worrying sign is that benchmark 10-year yields last week fell back below the fed funds rate. The 10-year yields reached 4.12% on Tuesday, while the fed funds rate held steady at 4.33%. “That is indicative of the economy essentially saying that the Fed is missing out here. It's behind the curve,” said Lou Brien, strategist at DRW Trading. While the curve can invert for different reasons, it often reflects a concern over Fed policy when longer-dated debt yields decline faster than shorter-dated ones. This is because longer-dated yields react to growth fears, while shorter-dated debt yields will reflect Fed interest rate expectations, and the possibility that the U.S. central bank will hold rates too high for too long. The closely watched spread between yields on three-month bills and 10-year notes also reinverted last week for the first time since mid-December. An inversion in this part of the curve is seen as an indicator that a recession is likely in the next 12-to-18 months. The gap between two-year and 10-year yields, also a closely watched recession indicator, has flattened back to 25 basis points, from a peak of 48 basis points in January, but has not reinverted. GROWTH WEIGHS ON LONG-END YIELDS Longer-dated debt yields have been dragged lower by increasing concerns about U.S. economic growth, in part due to government job layoffs by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Uncertainty over the impact of trade tariffs and other government policies is also weighing on consumer sentiment and dampening risk appetite. “Markets went from over-exuberance about the economy, that things are doing so well, to activity might fall off a cliff again,” said Jan Nevruzi, U.S. rates strategist at TD Securities. For two-year yields, “it's a little bit more pinned because of the limited reaction function by the Fed.” Optimism on Treasury supply has supported the decline in longer-dated debt yields, with the U.S. Treasury maintaining supply levels. Two-year yields caught up a bit on Tuesday as traders boosted bets that the Fed may cut rates sooner. It came after new tariffs on Mexico and Canada took effect, while levies on Chinese goods increased. Fed funds futures traders are now pricing in a roughly 50/50 chance of a rate cut now in May, with a move not fully priced in until June. The Fed cut rates by 100 basis points last year, starting in September, before pausing in January. "The market wants to price in some greater likelihood of some Fed activity to a greater degree this year," said Michael Lorizio, head of U.S. rates trading at Manulife Investment Management. To cut rates, however, the Fed will wait to see weakness in several economic metrics, he said. For now, the market moves are not fully signaling a slowdown. Fitzpatrick says the shift in the 2/5 yield curve has reached a "code orange" level of caution. If it inverts decisively with drops in longer-dated yields leading the move it may constitute a "code red," especially if it drops to around minus 20 basis points. For benchmark 10-year yields, Brien says further drops would be a stronger sign that the Fed may need to reconsider its policy. “If the 10s fall to 4% and the fed funds are still up at 4.5%, then it starts to look very suspect about the Fed having missed the turn and falling behind the curve." JOBS DATA KEY Clues about whether the United States is facing a more sustained downturn are likely to be in the jobs market, where hiring has slowed though layoffs remain relatively subdued. That could change quickly, said Brien. “When it actually turns, it's going to turn sharply because the layoffs will come.” Friday’s jobs report for February is expected to show employers added 160,000 jobs during the month, while the unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.0%, according to economists polled by Reuters. Inflation will also remain a key focus that could keep the Fed on hold for longer if it reaccelerates. The risk with the Fed is that it will wait too long to cut rates because it is “fighting yesterday's battle,” said Fitzpatrick. MY COMMENT YES....the FED is in danger of "fighting yesterdays battle".....or in my opinion....trying to prove something and send a message to the new government. I dont see any immediate danger....but as said above when it turns it can happen real quick. I think the FED is choosing to not see what is right in front of them right now.
Glad to see that LORI....is hanging in there right now and doing ok. She is one of our rare female posters. She is also one of our 3-4 outside the USA posters. It must be difficult to be investing in USA companies and funds as an International based person. The news and focus of all the financial media in any foreign country is NOT on what you are investing in. ACTUALLY....considering our financial media....perhaps being outside the USA media bubble is a good thing.
