Greetings, Warriors!
How’s the market treating everyone?
I consider Friday the 13th to be my lucky day as my Favorite Son was born on Friday the 13th, way back
in 1993. Ever since, if I bothered to notice when the calendar hit Friday (I always notice) and the
13th of the month (I hardly ever notice) at the same time, good things seem to happen. Raises when I
worked for others, payments received when I ran my own company, found items previously lost, etc.
So I’m going to count this month’s Friday the 13th as lucky too, but maybe that’s a stretch.
At the end of January, when you warriors were counting all your new shekels, I was dusting up after
the Shuffle. Still I was up 12.75% on 1/31. In February I lost less than $1k (0.0%) so I was still up
12.7%.
In March I gained a whopping 0.9% to leave me up 13.7% - for the quarter and the year. Being
disappointed on one hand and feeling lucky to survive on the other, along comes April and its infamous
13th, when I lost 11.5% in one day. Ouch. I was five digits in the hole with current holdings, which
was the first time I’ve had negative returns for my holdings for at least 6 years, which was as far as
I cared to search back. But I had booked some gains during the Shuffle, so I was still up for the
year. If you call 0.4% up.
Post 4/13 saw more volatility and several gains including 1 day of 10.1%, a few smaller gains, a small
loss and then last Friday, which gifted me another kick to the teeth at -8.1%. So after all this work,
I sit with a gain YTD of 5.0%. Almost seems not worth the trouble. But the weird thing is, it’s not
approximately 5%. It’s exactly 5.00000000%. To the penny.
Someone’s trying to tell me something. That makes me feel lucky, like someone’s watching out for me.
Now if I only knew what the heck the message was meant to be.
Cash in my chips awhile and let things cool off? Maybe. Or maybe I’m supposed to double down, I don’t
know. Without a further hint of a clue, I decided it was just to make me aware of how lucky I am.
Maybe not a great great investor. But lucky. Oh, and I think it was a message to be thankful for all
the gifts I’ve been given, on all the Friday the 13th’s and every day between.
And so I am.
Dan
ps: Although I don’t always enjoy them, market dips don’t scare me. And movies don’t scare me. (Okay,
maybe one did, but it took a projectile-vomiting little girl to do it, not some silly Halloween mask.)
So bring it on, Jason. http://fridaythe13thfilms.com/friday-the-13th-2009-retrospec…
Full Disclosure: Our leaders scare me. Bad health scares me. Can’t think of anything else.
Correction: Oops, almost forgot: The Exorcist wiped out my psyche for almost a full year. Oh, and
heights! After years of being an architect and builder, I suddenly and inexplicably became aichmophobic.
pss: Never mind. On further reflection, I’m afraid of many things. Friday the 13th just isn’t one of
them. 
