I flipped on Squawk Box (my favorite CNBC morning show) this morning at 4:45am.
“The US Futures are down 650 points on concerns that Russia has invaded Ukraine”, Beckie Quick quipped. (Okay, it wasn’t actually a quip, but the alliteration was too good to pass up.)
After wishing that all Ukrainians would be safe and okay, my next thought was “It should be a great day for tax loss harvesting.”
When I got back from the gym, the futures were even worse.
Sure enough at the market open, the Dow Jones gapped lower 839 points.
At the lowest point, the market was down 2.5%, until it closed…
…UP 1.5%!
So yeah, it was another Rip van Winkle Day.
As in, if you fell asleep under the apple tree last night and didn’t wake up until after the market closed today, you would have never known the sky was falling for most of the day.
The Lesson
The lesson – as always – is you will be well served to Rip van Winkle it through market fluctuations – not just day-to-day movements, but year-to-year and even decade-to-decade.
Market fluctuations should not change your investment strategy. So why bother watching the daily drama?
(Unless, of course, you’re talking tax loss harvesting, but your advisor-slash-roboadvisor should be doing that for you already.)
