We are nearing the half-way point of 2023.
As I type this, the S&P 500 is up over 12% and the Nasdaq is up 27% year to date.
US government Treasury bills are yielding around 5%.
This means that those stock indexes are outperforming safe money by more than double and more than quintuple respectively.
If I did a poll at the beginning of the year, not many would have guessed that.
If I got in a time machine and went back to January, my phone was not ringing off the hook and my email was not chiming with people craving to buy stocks.
This is another reminder that if you wire you investment decisions around your gut and around the media you consume, you will often make mistakes.
How do you think the year will end? Good? Bad?
That’s not the question you should be asking.
Nor should your primary concern for your portfolio at the beginning of any year be how the coming year might perform.
You need to ask bigger questions.
Questions that matter in decades. Questions around your family. Questions around your budget. Questions around your long-term goals.
Even if you’re seventy years old, you might have another ten to twenty years left. This doesn’t even factor in desires to leave something to the next generation.
Let me be honest with you.
Are you sitting down?
It doesn’t matter how you think this year will go for the stock market.