Wow, if I’m counting correctly, for the 3rd time in 7 business days, I have hit a new all time high one day drop in both percentage and dollar amount for my portfolio. IIRC 6 business days ago my portfolio hit a new single day percentage drop high of -12%, and the following business day after that, hit another high single day drop of -14%, then today trounced those by dropping over -17%, just today! That’s down over 37% in just those 3 days (I know there were also some up days in between, but just looking at the drop in just those 3 biggest days). Those are just some portfolio (and soul) crushing days!
Today, for the first time, I was actually dreading opening my spreadsheet to look at the portfolio, I never could have imagined almost every position dropping 15-20% or more in one day!
This was the first day that really gave me some anxiety about the market and having so much (well, actually, not as much, anymore) invested in it. I’m not selling like some others have stated they’ll be doing, or have done, I’m staying the course, but it is getting tough. I don’t really feel the draw to sell, but instead, I seem to want to just ignore the market and portfolio when this happens (bury my head in the sand?). But I also know that is not good for the stocks I own as we need to stay on top of them to make sure there are no material changes to their performance or prospects.
So in trying to find some silver lining/bigger picture, I was surprised when I looked at the YTD performance of my portfolio as it stands at -13.7% which really doesn’t sound that bad, all things considered. Especially when the Dow is currently down 32% and both the S&P and Nasdaq are down very close to 30%. I guess hitting that high of up almost 30% YTD in Feb was a good place to start this massive downdraft from.
So I realize I’m doing better than the averages by a large margin, but also realize as negative as things currently are, that this bear market could easily keep dropping a bunch more, before it gets better, but nobody knows for how long. It was the speed of the fall that is really unnerving.
I’ll just try to keep in mind what I heard David G state in a recent interview (paraphrasing as I best remember it), the market always goes down faster than it goes up, but always goes up more than it goes down. Looking forward to some of those going up days (although it may be awhile).