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Market malaise

May 16th, 2016 at 03:41 pm

I was checking my retirement balance (it's a bit less than it was at the end of April) and saw the performance summary for the first quarter of this year: up 1.26%.

Out of curiosity I ran a report for Jan 1 2015 through Dec 31 2015. Down 1.27%.

I don't know if that's a net gain or loss if you count all 15 months, but if it's a gain it's probably a depressingly small one.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that my investments will show a 6% return over time. Now that I'm paying more attention, I hope to someday see a good period that makes up for these crappy ones, but so far I haven't. My first foray into the market was when the tech bubble burst in 2000 or so and I had just put most of my 401(k) into a tech fund that had previously been making money hand over fist. I lost about 50% of my meager funds. Since then I've experienced the real estate bubble bursting, the Great Recession, and whatever you call this crappy period of time. So it's hard to have much faith.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Market malaise”

  1. creditcardfree Says:
    May 16th, 2016 at 04:17 pm 1463415472
    1463415472

    There's no guarantee in the stock market, but over long spans of time, most sectors do pretty well. Keep the faith!

  2. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    May 17th, 2016 at 01:22 am 1463448140
    1463448140

    Yeah. I get that same feeling sometimes.

  3. BuckyBadger Says:
    May 18th, 2016 at 12:28 pm 1463574513
    1463574513

    I have a sense that I maybe said this to you already, but am I remembering correctly that you have a goal for your overall account balance? If so, can I recommend again that you switch it to just a contribution goal?

    You have no control over the market, therefore you have no control over your balance. The only thing you can control is how much you put it, and it's important to not put in less just because the market is doing well, especially because it doesn't then make it easier to put in more when the market is doing poorly... Just try to shovel in the money consistently and let the markets do what they will.

    Anyway, I just wanted to suggest that you focus on contributions, not results. It also makes it much easier to "ignore the noise" and let your money sit there and do its thing. If you trust that, over time, the market will rise (which we all have to do, otherwise we wouldn't invest at all), then you have to just ignore it. Use low-cost index funds, set some sort of three to five fund "lazy portfolio" and just shovel your money in.

    I check my balances once a month just to see if I should rebalance anything to maintain my asset allocation, but many people only do that quarterly.

    It takes a LOT of stress out, and you definitely have other things to think about!

    Anyway, just my $0.02...

  4. ceejay74 Says:
    May 19th, 2016 at 01:09 am 1463620194
    1463620194

    I hear ya. I do! But I feel like at least when I'm so far behind, I have to keep that fact in front of me to motivate me to gradually get our contributions up. Don't worry, I'm not going to pull out because of 15 months of market stagnation--in fact, I just talked a friend out of doing it because she's had a Roth about the same amount of time I've been tracking, and she's not gained any value; in fact she's lost a bit. I know I have to be patient, but at the same time I need to keep retirement top of mind, and being so far behind is a motivator. Even if it's occasionally depressing to check my values regularly.

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