A Very Bad Day

[Anonymous]

2/5 was the worst single day market drop in history.

How's eerybody reacting?

I sold some and will buy back after the correction.

[Anonymous]

I only have my 401k to contend with which is all in low/moderate risk. I'll leave it alone but logging in to see a 7% loss saddens me.

[Anonymous]

yea i only have my 401k too and eh.. market goes up , it goes down..

[Anonymous]

I don't look at portfolio prices except when I have preplanned to rebalance my portfolio.

I don't look at bitcoin prices even though all my friends constantly to know "how much are you worth today?"

I don't look at property prices much, either.

Slow and low and patient wins the race here.  I buy the same amount of stocks/crypto/bonds/bullion/real estate every week as I have previous weeks and then 1-3 times a year at preset intervals I will log in to value it all and balance my holdings.

[wasCB14]

I didn't do any panic selling or anything drastic. I did sell some bonds because they were up, yielded little, and I saw some good alternatives.  I bought some Simon Property Group this morning.

I knew valuations were stretched on a Total Market Cap : GNP ratio. I could have had more cash.

I'm not concerned because I'm in high-quality companies that generate a lot of cash and don't especially need to access the capital markets by issuing new shares or more debt. If corrections let them buy back shares from others at low prices, that's okay with me.

[Anonymous]

401k is in a guaranteed fund, stocks took a hit, commodities did OK.

[Anonymous]

---

wrote:

2/5 was the worst single day market drop in history.

How's eerybody reacting?

I sold some and will buy back after the correction.

---

If you actually believe the highlighted statement you must be (a) quite young, and (b) residing on the East Coast and specifically in the NYC area.

For many of us in flyover country it was a non-event because we understand that the financial economy has little relation to the real economy. 

I lived in New York City when several market crashes occurred....1987 was the biggest of them all.  But I also remember the 1992 crash after an attempted coup in Russia against Boris Yeltsin because I was trading OEX options and I was long the market with no hedge. I held my nerve and didn't sell at a loss to preserve capital, and by the end of the week the market had rebounded and I closed out my position for a huge profit.  But many people were completely wiped out. I still remember the terrified looks on the faces of many riders as I rode the  No. 5 to my apartment in Brooklyn.

Then again in 1992 there was another market crash that occurred the day before I flew to Ann Arbor, Michigan to find an apartment prior to moving there for graduate school.  When I landed in Detroit the next day few people cared that the market had crashed.  People went about their everyday lives as if nothing had happened.  That experience taught me a lot about perspective and that newly found perspective away from the hyperfocus on the stock market in NYC enabled me to accurately anticipate that the market would react badly to President Clinton's health care reform speech to Congress; so I went short against the market and was successful beyond my wildest imagination.  The resulting crash after Clinton's speech allowed me to make money on the decline, which I then used to buy several healthcare stocks that I've held since then as they have all split multiple times.

The lesson in all that for me was to buy high-quality companies when they are bargain priced and don't pay attention to daily market fluctuations.  

[wasCB14]

It's also worth pointing out:

-The Dow is a flawed index (calculated in a bizzare way and not reflecting all or most companies).

-Though the worst day in terms of an absolute number of Dow points, it's only the 14th worst in percentage terms.

[iced]

---

wrote:

2/5 was the worst single day market drop in history.

How's eerybody reacting?

I sold some and will buy back after the correction.

---

I'm happy with it. I sold some about two weeks ago during the euphoria, but I'm leaving most in. People with long positions don't care about such insignifcant things as bad single days and corrections. It'll smooth itself out in time. Yes, some days you log in and see an account dropped $50,000, but you learn to ignore that and move on.

My next ESPP vesting hits next week and this means lower price which means more shares. A correction couldn't have come at a better time I say!

[Anonymous]

To be expected. I got lucky and sold all stocks in ira and taxable accounts couple weeks ago 

Im older so I felt market was too risky for me and took my profits. I still think stocks are overvalued but young people should be happy with pullbacks like this. 

For me , I need to see it go down a lot more to get back in. Nothing looks cheap and rates are going higher and there is no panic or pessimism in this market. Another 20% maybe there will be value