April Update
With the market having been in a bull run the last 9 years and with January starting off so great, had visions at the start of the year of this contest being a fun thing where we'd all have tons of profits showing by the end of the year. Guess the market has had other ideas
With the market being volatile but also flat in the net, the last couple of months of watching the market have had me feeling kind of similar to how things were sometimes with poker, after the heaters were over. Sometimes would go through fairly long periods of running break-even - and during those times, it would be nice to at least have rakeback.
Guess dividends are a way with investing to keep the gains coming no matter how the stock or the market is doing? Had a chance to add all the dividends from Q1 to everybody's portfolios, so quite a few of us got some nice little bonuses added this month. Have added a little note with the date and % of the dividend that looks like this, as showing with TheMVP's nice portfolio
Thanks so much to ToothSayer for the idea of leaving them until the end of the year - it felt really good to have an out in case things got to be too much. Was considering leaving things, but thanks to OlafTheSnowman's awesome code, it turned out to be not so bad (Thanks again Olaf!!
) - and remembering that there were dividends felt almost like finding money in a pile of papers ... times have gotten so rough with the market, it felt nice to be able to add that 0.40% to mine
And then, it looks like maybe a couple of people may have gone out of your way to find stocks with dividends? So some of the additions turned out to be quite substantial - Zeno got almost 10%!
Something else that's kind of cool to see is that although it's been kind of a flat month, it looks like virtually all of us ended off April with at least one pick of ours with double digit gains? Go us!
And there's 4 people who have portfolios with 10 picks and double digit gains, so congrats to the following people - ASAP's portfolio's still growing too
As well, a couple of stocks some people are holding had some double-digit gains this month:
ASAP17 - ACIA (short)
Backstabr, BooLoo, JoshSp - HOS
gangip - ALNA
mrbaseball - GLNG
Wilverine - MU
Zeno - TOT
Another reason the market's lately had me remembering those periods of running breakeven in poker is because have been finding myself wondering things lately like, "when will this end," or "what if the market's changed?
" Apparently these are very normal and common reactions - because money represents security and lots of other things to us. So it's human nature to want to make lots of money fast - and it's human nature to be a little anxious if the road becomes a little more rocky.
Was just looking back at how things were in the middle of the last big market downturn in 2008 - i remember my parents being so like, "omg ... yikes
" ...
And then not 10 years later, here we are ...
You think the market and the world's in decent enough shape that it'll be possible for the market to recover back to all-time highs in another 4 to 5 years, the way things have recovered after the last two downturns? If so, maybe we could be back here by 2022 or 2023?
Even if so, guess the big question may be what's in store for the market in between then and now??
Was looking around to see if there was any mental game stuff just for investing, and wasn't able to find anything like a Mental Game of Poker. Although was able to find quite a few tips tucked into articles on a bunch of other things, like how to keep a trade journal for reviewing hands, and stuff like that?
One tip that seemed like it might be helpful when the market starts to get rough was to maybe take a moment to remind yourself of what it is you do well. So going by stake, guess the list might look something like this?
- buy and hold ETFs - willing to hold through ~50% short-term swings because they've had superior gains in the long-run of +20 years
- buy and hold individual stocks/commodities - above, plus fundamental analysis to find enduring outperformers that are able to beat the market
- trend follow - above, plus technical analysis of 4 horsemen, etc
- short-selling and value investing - above, plus able to pick good entry (and possibly exit) points?
- options - Sam's not sure ... you'll have to fill this in yourselves
- other stuff (real estate (and renting), starting or investing in businesses) - ditto
Guess the idea is that there'll be something to feel good about when the market gets rocky - and also saw some tips on how to do it so there's more of a focus on info? Here's an example with some recommendations from the article
Guess it can also help us to avoid that tendency we all probably have at times to be self-critical, if the focus stays on the process and any lessons there are to be learned for how to possibly improve in the future?
There were a couple more interesting tips, but have run out of steam
Guess if the stock market continues to stay flat for the rest of the year, there may not be too much more to report, so will probably take the summer off from doing these monthly summaries. Maybe this is would be a neat opportunity for someone else with more experience to give one a try? That would be great to read!
PS Guess the market hasn't been great lately, but it's sure been beautiful out - so that's been nice
Last edited by TrustySam; 05-02-2018 at 01:30 AM.