Ed,
You’ve got two things going on. One is some financial setbacks, which you hope will prove to be temporary, and some emotional worry and discomfort, which makes it hard to think clearly, but is actually easy to fix, because it’s become Spring Time again --even in the Far, Frozen North-- and just getting outside in the fresh and sunshine air for a brisk walk or a bike ride does a lot to improve one’s outlook.
I have no idea how much money you have in stocks, most of have been heading down for a couple of months now, because that’s what stock prices do. They go up, and they go down, which is why timing matters, just as timing matters when you’re fishing. Sometimes, “the bite” is on. Sometimes, it isn’t, and it’s important to know the difference.
Right now, the sort of techie stocks TMF favors are getting hammered, because most of them aren’t profitable, well-established businesses. They are speculative bets that might or might not work out. So what you might want to do is shift your attention and focus on things that are making money, such as the following, which are shorts on oil/energy and whose prices are low enough that buying and losing the whole of single share won’t cause much damage. But if you do get their timing right, you’ve scored a decent win and one success often leads to another.
How long will it be before the price of oil rises again? Who knows? But when it does, you sell your short position and reverse to long.
Yes, I cherry-picked the examples, but the same sort of template should have been applied to the stocks you considered buying before you bought them. If prices aren’t making higher highs --and, in fact, are making lower lows–, why would you want to buy (or continue to hold)? At some point, as in some days on the water, there comes a point when you have to admit you’ve got better things to be doing with your time/money.
Lastly, there is supposed to be a difference between “investing” and “trading”. But the difference is mostly semantics. In both cases, you’re making a bet about the outcome of some future event, and you’re making the bet on the basis of imperfect evidence. That means you’re going to be wrong a lotta time, which means you gotta chop left-hand tails fast (aka, sell losers promptly and add to winners). That means that if someone quotes to you a right-wrong, win-lose ratio of 60%-40%, and that ratio is based on a larger sample of cases than you currently hold, you aren’t likely to capture the ratio they have observed, as the following coin flip example demonstrates.
As anyone could predict, the odds of guessing ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ when flipping a fair coin is 50-50. But if you flip four times, there is a 1/16 chance of getting four heads or tails in a row. If you’re a newbie investor and running a very imprudent, 10-20 stock portfolio on the basis of investing tips from someone who claims a 60-40, win lose ratio from 20 years of running portfolios, you can be absolutely sure that your own personally-experienced win-lose ratio will be materially different. Why? because market conditions are never constant. Sometimes, throwing darts will make you a ton of money. Sometimes --like now, amid rising interest rates and high inflation, never mind all the geo-political shifts happening-- market conditions just aren’t very favorable, and it’s better to step aside and wait things out. The person with the long track record has averaged out the bad years with the good ones and the record can make it seem as if wins and loses never vary much. But each year varies widely, and right now, nearly all of us are getting clobbered.
Arindam
https://www.barchart.com/shared-chart/DUG?chart_url=i_165548…
https://www.barchart.com/shared-chart/OILD?chart_url=i_16554…
https://www.barchart.com/shared-chart/DRIP?chart_url=i_16554…