Lost $9,000 in the Market Yesterday

Checked my MS Money data last night and I was down about $9,000 in paper losses on my stock investments. Its bittersweet, hard to dislike regular stocks gains, but secretly wanting stocks to fall signficantly to create better investment oppurtunities.

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Comments (7)

$6,976 for me. The interesting thing about it is that I constructed a portfolio with a beta of near 1 and my loss was a hair over 3.4% - exactly like the S&P500. I did a little more analysis in this post: http://moneycuts.com/28/ouch-6976

By the way... I purchased $10k of Vanguard's S&P500 index this morning using money that had been sitting in a money market account. Still... I refuse to admit that I'm market timing... I was planning on buying this for a while. ; )

Posted by Wes | February 28, 2007 10:30 AM

Just as you said, I'm fine with the market dropping. I wasn't looking for that big of sell-off, but even a better chance to get back in the market at even a cheaper price and utilize the fact that time is on my side for compounding and reinvesting.

I think the market was just looking for a reason to sell-off and the perfect opportunity happened when Greenspan woke up from his retirement and the Chinese rumors of capital gain taxes on stocks along with one of their high ranking financial guys was getting promoted to another position.

The Chinese quickly came out and said it was all false. Either way the Chinese market is up around 130% in the last year or two, so what's 9% in one day... It's nothing.

=) Happy Investing

Posted by Ray | February 28, 2007 1:29 PM

No worries, the market will come back eventually.

Posted by James | February 28, 2007 10:23 PM

I hate to be an I told you so guy, but anyone that was heavy on equity when the market dumped was begging for a beating. It's no different from the people who ran out to California last June to buy a house; how can people justify buying at a market's peak? It's ludicrous. The Dow was at historical highs for a number of months. It doesn't take a CPA to say "wow, those are some overpriced assets about to correct themselves". All those trying to make millions in the stock market are setting themselves up for disappointment. The market is not meant to generate capital, but to preserve it. The only way to make money with money is by taking an active approach.

Posted by Michael Jackson, CPA | March 2, 2007 1:14 AM

Why did my previous post get deleted?

Posted by Mike Jackson | March 2, 2007 1:43 PM

Don't take this as an insult, but I'm authoring a blog centered around critiquing other personal finance bloggers. From now on, I'll be posting my responses to your blogs (and those of a number of others) at www.capitalcritic.wordpress.com.

Posted by Mike Jackson | March 5, 2007 1:55 AM

I have little in the stock market at the moment but you have to be able to roll with the punches so to speak if you invest in them; markets will go up and down. You have to pick strong stocks and not worry about the short term gain.

Ideally if I had money a sell off like we're seeing now would be a buyers paradise.

Posted by Matt | March 5, 2007 7:25 AM