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The Stock Market Has Not Crashed…Yet
Take Earnings Now and Chill…
If there is one thing I learned during the pandemic, it is that America thrives on emotion. The pandemic caused a panic in so many ways. One of those ways was financial.
In March 2020, when the world began shutting down, the stock market began to tumble. In February 2020, the Dow Jones saw a then-peak of about 28,000 points. Then, on February 20, the market started tumbling due to growing concerns about the virus, and in mid-March, the Dow Jones fell below 20,000. Now THAT is a crash! We had not seen 19,900 since 2017.
Smart investors got out before mid-March to secure their gains and cut their losses. Others rode the seven-month roller coaster and eventually recovered those gains by October 2020.
The roller coaster is not fun for those who panic, but for those who understand that it is temporary and that funds will recover, it is just part of stock trading. Unless a person was within months of retiring, they really should not have had much worry.
Those who were not investing saw it as justification to not invest. I recall one acquaintance saying that one of his colleagues lost a certain dollar amount of his retirement. I walked him through the logic. If the Dow dropped 10% and your co-worker lost $30,000 (10%) of his account, then…
