The Price of Admission
Everything is down this year except cash and municipal bonds. Headlines are dismal. Volatility is rampant. This isn’t some freak event. It’s the price of admission. Taken as a whole, yes it is unusual to have almost every asset class down in a calendar year. What’s not unusual is the negative movements themselves. Stocks go down. Bonds go down. Commodities go down. Real estate goes down. They will also go back up. While the S&P 500 only got a bear kiss (down 19%, not a full 20% bear), we’ll eventually see another full-on bear market. The longer we go without one, though, the more hysterical the news will be. Each year that passes without a bear market is a year that experienced, seasoned folks retire and bright-eyed neophytes file in. We’ve had ten years of this. If your financial advisor is younger than 32, they haven’t navigated a bear market. …
