I wrote this four years ago. Seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Bears some relevance to what we are looking at for this year 2023:
A Little Perspective…
“Stocks Set to Clinch Best Year Since 2013…” exclaimed the Wall Street Journal front page on December 31, 2019. Business Insider gushed, “The S&P 500 surged 29% this year…” Even the New York Times gave praise to the American stock market in 2019, “S&P 500 Soars…”
And it was a great year. The S&P 500 was up 29%, the NASDAQ up some 35%. There’s lots of back-slapping and high-fives.
Does anyone remember how we started off 2019? Recall the fourth quarter of 2018?
It was awful. One of the worst fourth quarters in a long while. The S&P 500 lost 15% of its value between October 1, 2018 and Dec 31, 2018. We ended 2018 down on all broad market indexes.
Indexes and markets go up and down, more often up but never travel in a straight line. We tend to hover in the glow of the recent past if it was good or look forward to rosier times if not, hand-wringing and smelling salts or high-fives and back-slapping.
My point?
The world operates within the tidiness of calendar year benchmarks. Your life, though, is not a benchmark and your life is not lived in arbitrary calendar years. You walk upon this earth every day until you don’t. Best to stay focused on you and yours, and un-focus from the headlines of the day. Stay flexible and work on what you can control, namely your responses to an unexpected turn and your mindset going forward.
Here’s to 2020…
Well, here’s to 2023.