- Let’s Go Exploring: Cusco and the Lost City of Macchu Picchu - May 29, 2023
- Reader Case: Can I Move to Spain? - May 15, 2023
- Big Tech Is Laying Off Workers: Is Your Job Next? - May 1, 2023
These past few weeks have been an excellent time to get out, enjoy the nice weather, and ignore the financial markets because YIKES, have they been volatile!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1,063 points, or 3.12%, to close at 32,997.97. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.99% to finish at 12,317.69, its lowest closing level since November 2020. Both of those losses were the worst single-day drops since 2020.
Dow tumbles 1,000 points for the worst day since 2020, CNBC.com
The S&P 500 fell more than 13% between January and April of this year. That’s the worst four-month start to a year since 1939, when longtime legendary investor Warren Buffett was just nine years-old.
The S&P is having its worst start to a year since 1939, CNN.com
I guess this goes to show you how unpredictable, in the short term, stock markets can be. Going into 2022, everything was looking up and to the right. COVID was receding, vaccines were plentiful, countries were opening their borders again. We even managed to start travelling again for the first time in two years! In short, normality looked right around the corner and the world was eagerly getting ready to open back up for business.
Then…stuff happened.
Inflation reared its ugly head for the first time in 20 years. A war in Ukraine broke out. Central banks started hiking interest rates. And from there, all hell broke loose on the financial markets.
What’s Going On?
To a casual observer, 2022 feels like the total breakdown of traditional portfolio management rules. Stocks and bonds are supposed to be moving in opposite directions, yet right now they’re both dropping like a stone. The S&P 500 is down 16% year-to-date, but the bond index is not much better, down about 10%. The International Index, as tracked by the MSCI EAFE ETF (EFA) is also down 15%. Up here in Canada, the TSX is doing better due to Canada benefitting from the recent increase in oil prices, but we’re still down about 8%.
Other traditional safe havens of wealth haven’t exactly performed as advertised either. Holding cash means you’re guaranteed to lose purchasing power when savings accounts and money market funds are paying less than inflation. Real estate, traditionally useful as a hedge against inflation, is getting hammered with price declines already being felt due to rapidly increasing interest rates. Even gold hasn’t been useful as a safe haven, having retreated 8% from its high in March 2022. And of course, as FIRECracker noted, Bitcoin (and other crypto assets) have been useless as a stable hold of value, having plummeted a breathtaking 37% from so far this year. Far from being digital gold, Bitcoin has revealed itself to be just another speculative tech investment, its performance closer to the NASDAQ this year than gold or cash.
And oh yeah, US GDP shrank for the first time since the pandemic.
Gross domestic product unexpectedly declined at a 1.4% annualized pace in the first quarter, marking an abrupt reversal for an economy coming off its best performance since 1984, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
U.S. GDP fell at a 1.4% pace to start the year as pandemic recovery takes a hit, CNBC.com
On April 28, the US Commerce Department reported a decline of 1.4% in GDP for the first quarter. Analysts had been expecting an increase of about 1% as the economy continued to recover from the pandemic despite all the news coming out of Ukraine, so this was a surprise.
So of course the dreaded R-word starting circulating in the media.
Recession.
Are we headed towards one? When, and how painful would it be? Could the world economy even handle another recession having not completely recovered from the last one?
All good questions that nobody can really answer with 100% certainty. But since this is a financial blog and I’m a highly qualified (?) finance blogger, I thought I’d toss in my two cents on where I think the global economy is headed.
The Four Most Dangerous Words
Before I get into that, I want you to ponder something.
If you knew for sure that a recession was coming up in the next 12 months, what would you do?
Maybe you’d do nothing. Or maybe you might delay some planned ETF buys so you can get them later at a better price. But the majority of retail investors would answer something to the effect of “Sell everything and move to cash until the dust settles.”
In the financial advisory world, “until the dust settles” are considered among the four most harmful words to a person’s investment portfolio. Because “until the dust settles” is just code for “until I feel more confident about investing in the stock market.” Here’s why that’s bad.
Let’s say that you knew that a correction of 10%-20% was going to happen in the next 12 months, so in order to avoid that loss, you sell everything and move to cash.
Then what?
You can’t just sit on the sidelines forever. If you want to retire early, you’re going to have to get back into the market at some point. So when, and at what price, should you do it?
There are three possibilities. You could buy back in when prices are…
- lower than your sell price
- the same as your sell price
- higher than your sell price
The last option is bad because it means you waited too long and missed out on a buying opportunity. The second option is better, but not great because it means your performance turned out to be the same as if you had done nothing, plus you would have missed out on dividend payments while you were out of the market.
That means that if you plan on cashing out your investments, the only way to make that decision worth it is if you buy back in at a lower price. That way, you will have avoided the losses on the way down, but able to participate in the gains on the way back up.
Unfortunately, none of the people who choose to sit on the sidelines “until the dust settles” will be able to do this. After all, if they’re getting nervous enough to pull all their money out at the mere hint of an upcoming recession, how are they going to feel when markets are down another 10%? 20%? 30%? That fear will paralyze them and keep their cash on the sidelines until the crisis has passed, at which point prices will likely be as high or even higher than when they sold.
So to a certain extent, trying to time recessions is pointless, because only people who get out and successfully get back in at (or near) the bottom of the market will be able to benefit, and the vast majority of investors (including myself) have no idea how to do that.
Better to stay invested and, if possible, buy the dip as markets go down. And remember, you’re still going to get your dividends and interest as you hold.
Behind The Numbers
So that being said, back to the original question: Do I think there’s a recession coming in 2022?
In short, no I don’t.
As scary as the headline numbers seem, I don’t think they tell the whole story. If we dig into these stats a little bit, we can see that there are actually some pretty strong signs of an economy that’s actually pretty healthy. I’m going to focus on three of them, and they are: Imports, Earnings, and Employment.
Imports
Why do imports matter here? They matter in understanding the context behind the drop in the US Q1 GDP.
A decrease in GDP is normally a pretty big deal, and when problems are identified, economies as large as the US are slow to change course. The time it takes for a new government policy to be visible in GDP typically takes at least 6 months, so a negative GDP number is cause for alarm because a) the definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth and b) anything the government does now to fix it won’t be felt in time to avert that negative second quarter.
But in this case, a negative GDP number isn’t quite the bad news we think it is. The reason? Imports.
The way GDP is calculated is that things that a country produces, and especially things that a country exports, all count positively towards their GDP. Conversely, things that the country imports count negatively.
And as you recall, during the second half of 2021, the US desperately needed things from other countries like computer chips, cars, and MacBooks but couldn’t get them because of supply chain issues. That means that a lot of orders got pushed forward until overseas suppliers could deliver.
And deliver they did. In Q1 of 2022.
That swell of pushed-forward import activity counted against the US GDP number big time, to the tune of 3%.
A burgeoning trade deficit helped shave 3.2 percentage points off growth as imports outweighed exports.
U.S. GDP fell at a 1.4% pace to start the year as pandemic recovery takes a hit, CNBC.com
This means two things. One, if all those imports hadn’t hit at the same time, Q1’s GDP would have been something around 1.6-1.8%, which would have beat analyst expectations of 1% growth. Second, this effect is temporary rather than systemic. Now that the backlog has been mostly filled, we’re not going to keep seeing this negative weight on GDP going forward. The underlying economy is still strong, and still recovering, and once imports are taken out of the equation, analysts are predicting Q2’s GDP to come in positive, with even more positive numbers going forward.
In other words, the drop in GDP was a sign of a one-off blip rather than a harbinger of an impending recession.
Earnings
But what about the stock market? Why is it dropping so far and so fast?
When an index falls in value, there are basically two reasons: Either earnings are falling, or the price-to-earnings multiple is collapsing.
Earnings fall when companies makes less money. When this happens, it’s natural for stocks to fall since those companies are worth less. The price-to-earnings multiple, or P/E ratio, however, is a measure of how a stock trades relative to its earnings, and is entirely driven by investor sentiment.
What we’re seeing in 2022 in the stock markets is a curious, and abnormal, pattern. Stocks are falling precipitously, but earnings are not. In fact, earnings are continuing to go up as the economy continues to recover from the hangover of the pandemic.
Looking ahead, analysts expect earnings growth of 7.0% for Q2 2022, 11.7% for Q3 2022, and 11.2% for Q4 2022. For CY 2022, analysts are predicting earnings growth of 10.9%.
S&P 500 EARNINGS SEASON UPDATE: APRIL 22, 2022, FactSet.com
When earnings go down, it’s common for the P/E ratio to compress as well. I would consider this a “real” correction since it’s actually based on the financial performance of the underlying companies.
However, when earnings are stable (or going up) and the P/E ratio is still compressing, that’s just irrational. The companies are making more money now as they were 3 months ago, yet those same companies are somehow worth 16% less? That doesn’t make sense.
Markets sometimes behave irrationally, but if you wait long enough they always correct. That’s why I’m not too worried about what’s happening in the stock markets now. The underlying companies in the index are still doing well, and that means that once investors get all that fear out of their system things will return to normal.
Which brings me to the final piece of the economic puzzle, and that’s…
Employment
There’s a quote I love from President Truman, and it goes…
A recession is when your neighbour loses their job. It’s a depression when you lose yours.
Harry S. Truman
Declining stock markets are part of recessions, but the really harmful part is the spike in unemployment. When the economy slows down so much that workers start getting laid off left and right, that’s when you should be worried.
We’re not there yet. Not even close.
In the US, unemployment is sitting at a rock bottom 3.6%. In Canada, it’s 5.3%. These numbers are in line with the clicking hot economy we all enjoyed in 2019 before COVID hit. Not only that, our economies are still having trouble hiring people. As I walk down the street, seemingly every restaurant has a sign up that says “Now hiring: Cooks, hostesses, waiters.” Job boards are bursting at the seams. Even wage pressures are picking up, as workers have been quitting their jobs, hopping between companies and getting pay raises each time.
Job markets are red hot right now, and that’s completely incompatible with the idea that a recession is around the corner. When recessions happen, the signs popping up all over the country usually say something like “Out of business” or “Foreclosure.” Not “Help Wanted.”
Of course, things could change at any moment, but the tight labour market is giving the Federal Reserve (and the Bank of Canada) plenty of assurance that they can tame inflation and engineer the soft landing that everyone wants. By not raising rates too fast and keeping an eye on their impact on the job market, they can cool the economy without throwing people out of their jobs. And if that happens, there won’t be a recession.
Conclusion
Recessions are scary things, and when I first read the headlines I was among the many who thought “Oh great. This again. As if we didn’t have enough shit to worry about.”
But upon closer inspection, I think the risk of a recession in 2022 is way overblown. The Q1 GDP number looks to be a red herring. Corporate profits remain healthy. And anyone who wants a job can get one. In that economic environment, a recession seems extremely unlikely and the recent market volatility so far appears to be just full of sound and thunder, signifying nothing.
What do you think? Do you think a recession will happen in 2022? Why or why not? Let’s hear it in the comments below!
Hi there. Thanks for stopping by. We use affiliate links to keep this site free, so if you believe in what we're trying to do here, consider supporting us by clicking! Thx ;)
Build a Portfolio Like Ours: Check out our FREE Investment Workshop!
Travel the World: Get covid-19 coverage for only $45.08 USD/month with SafetyWing Nomad Insurance
Multi-currency Travel Card: Get a multi-currency debit card when travelling to minimize forex fees! Read our review here, or Click here to get started!
Travel for Free with Home Exchange: Read Our Review or Click here to get started.
Earn 15% Cash-back: Earn an extra 15% back for a limited time with a Tangerine World Mastercard! Click here to sign up!
I have seen some beloved business I used to patronize shut down, which is sad. But I am also seeing Help Wanted signs elsewhere.
I think you make good points. Recession or not, hope we can all get through this!
Thanks! And yeah, some businesses did fail during the pandemic, but I’ve been amazed by how many actually managed to survive and are now hiring. I mean, no major airlines fell over. That’s pretty amazing.
The markets are just emotionally reacting to the hike in interest rates. Once we all get over that and realize its not the end times, it’ll bounce back.
Yes, exactly. Honestly, this is mostly caused by the fact that this is the first time Millennials have ever dealt with rising interest rates and they don’t know what to do.
Another point about sitting on the sidelines – what if the recession comes like a year or two later than you expect, and in the meantime it goes up dramatically? Then “when the dust settles” it may bottom out even higher than when you sold. So even if you time the bottom correctly you still lose, because you didn’t time the beginning correctly.
Great point. And it might tempt you to go back into the market too soon, and then bam!
Stay on the course! Keep invest. Thanks for great article!
has there ever been a time when the Federal Reserve raised interested rates fairly aggressively to tame inflation (like in the early 1980s) and a recession did NOT occur?
Yes, in 1994, I believe. (I just read this somewhere…I was a freshman in college and was not at all aware of anything beyond my dorm life and classes). But I read that inflation started to increase and Alan Greenspan raised interest rates and successfully avoided a recession. However, I’m pretty certain inflation wasn’t nearly as aggressive in 1994 as it is currently.
Thanks! Stumbled across this article as a result! Key takeaways – https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/16/economy/federal-reserve-interest-rates-recession/index.html
But there are some major differences between 1994 and 2022, and timing may be the most important factor.
Greenspan proactively raised rates. He saw that the economy was booming and wanted to get ahead of the inevitable inflation. Powell has been more reactive. He hiked rates by half a percentage point only after inflation soared to levels unseen in decades. There’s a possibility that the Fed may be too far behind the curve to be able to ease inflation without inflicting economic hardship on Americans.
Employment today isn’t what it was then, either. In 1994, baby boomers were at the heights of their careers, loads of new technology was being introduced in the workplace, and immigration numbers were strong. All of that led to a huge workforce and productivity rates that kept unemployment low even as interest rates rose. In 2022, we’re faced with boomers who are ready to exit the workforce, a significant pandemic-reduced labor participation rate and a productivity slowdown.
“In the past, when you’ve pushed up the unemployment rate, you’ve almost never been able to avoid a full-fledged recession,” Dudley said. “The problem the Fed faces is they’re just late.”
I like buying things on sale. Right now, the market is on sale.
All a recession means is that the stock market has been down for six months. Unless it recovers next month we are definitely in for one. Thankfully the weird thing like you mentioned is the sheer amount of jobs available which offsets the problems we are about to face
What jobs are available? Low skilled, low pay service jobs no-one wants. Amazon said recently they over hired. Uber is reducing its workforce. Many great companies aren’t hiring now and I think Microsoft is one. Signs of a recession are out there if you look. We could be in one right now. Bengen the 4% rule and market guru is at 70% cash if that means anything. He’s terrified of the market conditions. Lastly, our leaders are silent on what is going on beneath the surface and not being honest that we are in trouble. Probably because they don’t want to hurt consumer spending which is our last hope out of this mess. The market is reacting to more than just interest rates. Target dropped yes 25% in a day – does that happen if we are still in a recovery or if we are more likely heading the other direction.
No, a recession is based on GDP, and it’s possible for GDP and the stock market to move in opposite directions since the stock market is a forward-looking indicator and GDP is a backwards-looking one.
I suppose everyone loves a good confirmation bias but thank you SO much for putting my thoughts almost exactly into this post. I just couldn’t understand why the markets were in total freak out mode for no apparent good reason. That said, I am very glad that I sold a chunk of stock at the peak and bought Fundrise to cover just exactly this scenario.
I also went to a professional conference for the first time in 5 years, picked up a client and earned enough for all of 2022 by March. I think the best part of being FI is that I can pick and choose what I want to do with my life. Mini experiments are AWESOME (thank you Alan Donegan!) – I love that I just “gave it a go” and discovered a little bit of work on your own terms is actually fun – for me, there are some things that you can’t get anywhere else than from paid work.
Nice timing on the sell!
And I will make to pass on your thanks to Alan 🙂
Sound research and reasoning. We’re buying the dip and staying on the roller coaster, just as we did during the pandemic.
Yup, lots of dip-buying queued up over here in a giant DCA…
So you believe in DCA? I buy as soon as the money is available regardless of price. I believe JLCollins did not believe DCA is beneficial. I’d like to hear your reasons for this. I’ve read your DCA posts but it sounds like a “not freak out” decision vs math based on historical data?
I don’t know if a recession is coming or not (going to stay invested either way ofc), but I don’t think using employment is a good measure. Employment is generally a lagging indicator, specifically it lags the stock market. When all these companies have their stocks tank, they are going to be looking for more “efficiencies” and lay people off, thus increasing unemployment. It’s cause and effect.
And that’s for the companies that make money. The ones that don’t might end up going bust when they can’t raise more money from the capital markets. Then everyone working for them will be out of a job.
Continuing to DCA on the way down. See you on the way up.
I think employment is more a lagging indicator of earnings rather than the stock market. If a company’s stock tanks but it’s earning the exact same amount of money as before, that company’s not going to lay off workers.
I can see that. Perhaps its more accurate to say that employment is a lagging indicator of stocks especially for companies that have negative earnings.
I’m praying for a recession !! It’s gonna happen someday regardless, so I want it to happen while I’m still relatively young. I would love for a 2008 style “Great Recession” to hit, acting as a sort of “Q/A tester” for my investments. I want to know what, if anything, is wrong with what I’m doing.
Regarding all the “Now Hiring” signs, although a little conspiratorial, there is a consensus that much of this is a mirage. In any given urban/business area, “Now Hiring” signs far outnumber “Will Work For Food” signs that the homeless display. There’s been suggestions that the “Now Hiring” people are as interested in actually hiring as the “Will Work” people are interested in doing any work.
The Great Recession caused a lot of suffering. I’m unsure why you would be “praying” for this to happen again. Maybe figure out another way to test the strength of your portfolio.
Ugh. Please no. I can’t go through another near-global financial meltdown again.
this site has gone from a ‘don’t worry, stay balanced ‘ mindeset….to now making predictions and diving into data to figure if a recession is around the corner?
oh my
yup, been rough as bonds r positively correlated to stocks right now. Sit tight, not easy looking at the portfolio
Hey, I still think you should not worry and stay balanced.
But you know what? All the COOL economists are trying to guess whether a recession’s coming. I wanted to play too!
I think we are already inside a recession.
The obvious cause : inflation.
If you dig down a little bit more on Q1 2022 US GDP data, you will find that nominal GDP is up by 6.5%. But since inflation was 7.8% during the quarter, the “real” GDP, thus the nominal GDP minus the estimated inflation rate, was negative -1.4%.
https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-first-quarter-2022-advance-estimate
This is not really surprising. All costs are up, from food to oil, and including housing or cars. At some point, even if you spend 5% more (nominally) than the year before, you get less goods and services, because a large portion of your budget goes into paying higher prices.
This decrease in “real spending”, in economic term, is called a recession.
It’s still possible we are not inside one. But, given everything what’s happening right now (war in Ukraine, lockdowns in China, more price increases), I would be very surprised if we are not already in a recession.
I would put odds of recession at 90% – my own estimation / opinion.
But, I agree with you, most people can’t do anything about it. Personally, I thought the odds of a recession were pretty high (maybe 50%/50%). But it would have happened much faster than I had thought…
So I guess on top of all that, I do have confidence that the Fed will eventually get inflation under control. They know how to engineer a soft landing like in the 1990’s.
If inflation continues to rise and stays that way for a longer period of time, prices all around will continue to rise. People will either cut down spending or pick and choose what they want to spend money on…OR may not have money to spend. If that ends up being the case over a longer period of time, then a recession is likely. Production and earnings may look good now. If however demand goes down due to higher prices, earnings will start declining…and companies may be forced to lay off.
The big concern I have is supply chain issues are far from sorted out. I work in medical device manufacturing (for just a little longer until my RE date) and we have demand through the roof, are hiring like mad, but have shortages of all kinds of materials. Chip shortages we are hearing will not resolve until 2024, which will really limit our ability to ship products. (Can’t ship medtech minus a few parts like a Tesla). We also have shortages of items from China due to their lockdown. Even silly things like glossy paper is expected to be out of stock for 6 months.
The big companies that drive the markets may be able to use their weight to get what they need, so maybe this will be less visible.
Yikes, that does sound concerning. Hope things pick up for your industry soon.
Great article. I love your writing!! Sounds like a time to buy buy buy!
Economically, recession has actually already started with the advent of covid lockdown and massive supply chain disruption. By the time you hear news of recession being confirmed, it means the financial market bottom is very very near. Higher interest rates and Fed tapering will accelerate the financial market downward further from now onward. Cheaper sale coming soon. Cryptocurrency will be a huge buy when the time comes. Its value changes just like everything else. What we invest is not today, but the future. Otherwise, show me an investment that never go down, but only up.
Otherwise, show me an investment that never go down, but only up.
————-
Easy. Your apartment rent.
That’s something that either stays the same from year-to-year (rarely) or goes up (almost always) and never, never goes down.
Ask yourselves this:
When’s the last time a landlord comes to you and say they are going to LOWER your rent for the next lease?
I bet that has never happened in world apartment rental history.
Apartment rent, huh. Good answer. But it’s not even a good enough “investment” to me (in fact it’s more income-like than investment-like, whereby you need to somewhat manage/oversee it instead of staying passive) because you need to expect the tenant to stay for many many years to come without breaking anything that needs you fixing.
Funny you should mention that, because during the pandemic our rent did go down because we kept hopping between apartments as rents plummeted.
I think stock prices versus earnings have spiked due the market being awash with easy money during the pandemic. So the fall in stocks is only a correction back to more sensible P/E levels.
I don’t know if that means we’re done or there’s more to come, but either way it doesn’t concern me as a systemic problem.
This year we’re going to have plenty of weird inputs into the system – grain shortages from Ukraine, supply chain issues due to China’s latest covid wave shutdowns, energy price hikes – so I expect we’ll get our share of turmoil, but I’ve no idea whether that will emerge as a traditional “recession”.
Being in retail, I’ve always thought retail recessions were due to consumer confidence. That’s often rooted in jobs, but other things like war and gas prices can hit confidence too.
We’ll see. But there’s absolutely nothing on the horizon to make me think of diverting course – I plan to just keep slowly buying the same assets.
I like your optimism!
Just do what I do. Set limit buying order at -5% all the way to -35%, increasing the number of shares you buy exponentially as the mkt goes down.
Where the money comes from? Short/intermediate term bonds (opportunity reserve) and my salary (not FIRE yet).
Then forget it until they execute! This is what MadFientist does and is what I do.
That is quite an interesting system.
I dunno, man. I think I’m too much of a control freak to let automated rules make decisions for me. I want to press the buy button and hear it go “ding,” not be sitting on the can and hear “dingdingdingding” and then go “WTF DID I JUST BUY?!?”
I would argue we are already in recession. The Fed needs to increase interest rates in a meaningful way to cool inflation. A 1/2 point here and there is not going to do it. Trillions have been artificially pumped into the U.S. economy with moratoriums on student loans, mortgages, and rent. I predict a stagnant return from the stock market for several years. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket. We have just had horrible economic policy for several years through the COVID pandemic. Horrible. Not to mention the lower labor participation rate. Unemployment doesn’t count those who have simply dropped out of the work force.
dropped like the FIRE crowd!
Hey, don’t blame us! We didn’t cause this!
What happened to equities and inflation being correlated?
Are you implying that since we have inflation, stock prices should be going up? We are experiencing record inflation coupled with poor economic output. This is a great time to be investing.
In the long term, it is. That effect is being obscured right now by wild day-to-day swings.
with that view, everything can be interpreted as applying.
you could also sayequities is a leading indicator for inflation sjnce equities were surging the last decade in a time of relatively lower inflation. we had low rates and even deflationary talk then. now, it is crashing in a time of high inflation.
Great article. I’m especially interested in your P/E comment. Historically the CAPE-Schiller index has averaged around 16ish, and right now we’re at 30ish (down from 40ish at the start of the year). There’s a lot of debate among financial managers as to whether P/Es can stay elevated for another decade, or if at some point soon the S&P will drop another 50% and really return to a historically consistent P/E. Some argue that because the S&P is so tech heavy now (unlike in the pre-2000, FAANG area) the 16 average no longer applies, but in European economies with no FAANG-type companies, it still does. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks so much for the great post!
Great article, and you make great arguments for optimism. I did want to comment on one item. You commented on the TSX doing better, but I think if you factor in changes in the CAD to USD currency rates it doesnt look like much difference at all. I’m a fan of Henry Hazlitt’s book “Economics in One Lesson” and it explains exactly what is happening after our governments creating so much money, an approximate 1 year lag before you see the effects of inflation. It’s like another form of taxation.
So we just had shocking drops in revenues this week for some major players in the economy and the S&P is flirting with a bear market.
I also remember your call that Trump was going to tank things, and even despite COVID (that he screwed up royally,) he left office at peaks/near peaks and the S&P performance under him rivalled only under Clinton and Obama. (Btw, I think creating arbitrary, discrete cut points in macro-economic trends is specious, but that’s another conversation.)
What I’m getting at is I have a plan and I pretty much just stick to the plan no matter what the market is doing as I readily acknowledge I cannot predict what will happen next. My plan includes safety nets for things like SORR (I feel sorry for new retirees that did not plan for that,) as again, I know I cannot predict what will happen next.
We all predicate things on the thought the market will generally trend up and that’s pretty much the only directional call I’ll make.
We are already in a recession…at the start. That’s what it feels like.
As for jobs, one indicator is to look on the govn’t side. They’re still hiring because a bunch retired in past 2 yrs. Then others who are still around because the stock market is pushing down their portfolios.
I agree to hang onto good blue chip stocks for awhile. But it might be a long while. We must remember: there is a still a war Russia insists on raging.
When the market crashed in March 2020, I asked around in my circle if people were going to be taking advantage and buying at extremely discounted equity prices. All I heard was: I am waiting to buy because this downturn is going be long and we will see a double dip.
I on the other hand dumped my cash and the kitchen sink into the market and it has paid off handsomely. Unsurprisingly, during this year’s bear market; I have been leveraging our incomes and savings to buy aggressively again. As I see it, the market gods have given us this opportunity to buy at last year’s prices and I just cannot pass on that. Our time horizon is long and our incomes are from a relatively recession proof industry. In the long term, we will look back in joy that we were able to take advantage of discounted equity prices. Just my two cents.