And lo, there was great rending of garments and gnashing of teeth across the land… so just some simple advice really, which simply boils down to DON’T PANIC!
But you probably already knew that.
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STORYTELLING 101 with Mike Rowe, Part Two: THE HOOK
April 17, 2025
3 Comments
Our family is a buy-and-hold on stocks. Tariffs and re-shoring – I received some good news today. Corporate Layoffs and RIFs were standard practices 10-20 years ago as manufacturing was out-sourced primarily out of the country. A local site of a global corporation is now bringing back manufacturing and rehiring employees previously lost to down-sizing.
locally, tariffs are working as the corporation off-shored to multiple countries.
Folks, it’s stock markets! “They go up tiddly up up, they go down tiddly down down“. As in the poetic words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Into each life some rain must fall.” If one has $ +/or cajonies to be heavily invested in stocks (quite risky), one must be prepared to gain much or lose everything. A thick skin w/patience is a must. I’ve even seen “low yeild” (ETF, blue chips, mutuals, bonds) retirement portfolios reduced by many ‘thousands equity $‘ (kinda terrifying). However, this equity is worth zero, until cashed in. Opinion? Wait for rebound, after $9.2T in bond… Read more »
p.s. ‘Shark Tank’ Kevin O’Leary says 104% Trump’s tariffs on China aren’t high enough, suggests 400% – double what I suggested above. See it >HERE< (appologies for linking to the CNN site where video resided)
My Mom said just about the same as what Steve’s wise friend said. My Depression-raised folks both grew up pretty poor, and never got over it! They remained frugal and refused to get into debt. My Dad said he spent half his life voting against FDR. He was a logger, and bought timberland next to his home place whenever it became available. He also bought stocks. The neighbors, who mostly didn’t, asked what they’d lost when the market would go down. Mom said “Nothing, we didn’t sell.”
The best explanation of any market I have heard is this: The stock market is driven between two primal forces, fear and greed. When the majority of people are fearful, the market goes down. When the majority of people are not being fearful, their greed is free to take over and, the markets go up. I have found this to be very true. Knowing this, how can we use it? The idea is to understand the basis for the fear, or lack of fear. In this case, it was the tariffs. I actually heard a second hand account of a… Read more »
Elon Musk can sue the previous owner of Twitter for the same reason Leticia James prosecuted Trump, over inflating the value of your property.
Except that neither one would be a valid claim. Which with anyone else I’d assume was your point and you were being sarcastic. However, I’m not willing to cut that much slack for someone who regularly claims the Earth is flat, the moon is a giant hollow spaceship and the government of the United States of America is an illegitimate corporate vassel possessed by Great Britain or Israel, depending on what day of the week it is. You see, lil’ Donny, when you say such stupid things it’s natural to inevitably conclude that anything else you have to say flows… Read more »
When I was young, whenever people would talk about investments they would always compare it to keeping your money in a conservative mutual fund. The unspoken lesson was that you could make serious money if you made educated guessed correctly, but if you just put something in every month you did pretty well with no ulcers as a result. If I’d have had spare cash I wanted to use, I would have bought, bought, bought this week. But I just took a deep breath and thought about other stuff.
If I had money to spare, I’d invest heavily.
You know, buy low, sell high. The stock market always recovers. It’s just a matter of when.
For example: as I’m writing this, Trump delayed the 10% tariff, and who da thunk it? The stock market has gone up!
Now my wife thinks she’s lost money in her retirement funds. I keep telling her she’s not lost a penny unless she cashes out some of it.
Scott, speaking of your old website, have you taken a look at Scrappleface.com lately?
Yep, it’s now a Vietnamese gambling site.
I’m trying to come up with a good, snarky, follow up comment, but even I am at a rare loss of words for this one.
In short, Doug Adams had it figured:
and
And of course, the answer to everything is… 42
Y’all need to quit being such hoopy froods. You’re making the rest of us look bad.
Well, it used to be 42. But now the right answer is always 45 or 47, but never, ever, ever is it 46.
LOL, another hoopy frood heard from!