Curiously, the Japanese to the month of October as "the Month without Gods," and it certainly has felt that way this month. I don't attend church and don't profess to be affiliated with any organized religion, but I do "pray" or "wish for" things to happen, usually related to me, but sometimes to other people. For example, I pray that something good will happen to someone else in the world, that there will be less death and suffering. I also pray for winning to win the lottery, which was I'm sure a common prayer this month with the Mega Millions lottery ballooning to 1.6 billion; I also do wish that whoever ultimately won that grand prize (somewhere in South Carolina, as reported) will do something good with it, as I would have. Easy to say, I know, but I honestly would have devoted a lot of time and energy and obviously money towards solving social issues with the money, visit different charities or countries to make sure my money was going to a good cause, and then give to those causes. I also wish for my wife and my family's success, health, and happiness.
My No.1 prayer, though, this month, has been for the stock market to rebound, and since I'm writing about it, you can probably guess that it hasn't rebounded; worse, it keeps going down. I read my February entry about the Great Recession of 2018 and I've basically all the checkmarks of things I shouldn't do that I wrote about then. I pay too much attention to the market, I don't realize things can go down a lot faster then they go up, I don't realize how much losing hurts compared to winning. Added some other lessons though:
1.) Many in the market say don't panic sell. I agree with this, but sometimes having a little panic is good, as opposed to being complacent and always thinking the market will go up. I ask myself how I can just watch the stock go down this month without taking much action, and a lot of the reason stems from continuously thinking the stock will bounce back any time. Yes, eventually stocks SHOULD bounce back, but it's very difficult to call a "bottom," and can become very costly if you're wrong.
2.) Kind of related to No. 1, don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, or even smart, at playing the market. As Jim Cramer says, "THEY KNOW NOTHING!" not even the best people in the world can know exactly what the stock market is going to do next; let alone the casual investor like me. I can't think that just because I try to "buy low" that the stock's going to go up just because I bought it. The stock market's like a raging bull (well, actually, in the last month, a bear); you can't try to outsmart it or tame it and plant a flag that says "I defeated the market! I called the bottom!" you just got to react, try to take some profit if you can, limit the losses, and try to stay alive.
3.) I started trading on a site called Robinhood a few months ago, and it's helpful to not have to pay commissions on any trades, which is a blessing, but it also becomes a curse for me to make reactionary moves all the time. It allows for much easier panic-selling, feeding into my buyer's or seller's remorse ( I regret buying/selling and want to redo my position, basically neutralizing what I just did minutes ago), and it becomes such a mess I forget what I was trying to do in the first place. And I also make tiny trades so that mistakes wont' hurt as much, but then that leads to leaving too much of position open to a huge sell-off ( I didn't sell enough).
4.) I think I'll always remember the day of October 25, 2018. I knew Amazon earnings were coming out, but the whole day the stock market went up and up, recovering a lot of the losses that I had incurred this past month. "Let's go! This is it!" it was like I was a fan at a sports game, cheering for my team, the (stock market) bulls. I considered hedging a bit from Amazon, but I thought earnings were coming out, they did so well last time, if they do well, I might get all the money back! 3:00PM was the close of the market, I eagerly await, and at 3:01PM the stock plunges, instantly eviscerating all the gains from the 7-hour trading day in a click of a button, then going down more, and dragging the stock market with it today. It was really the worst-feeling website click in my whole life, watching the AMZN stock say -80.00 in red letters after-hours. Hopefully that will FINALLY, FINALLY ingrain in me the lesson that all gains are temporary until you close out the trade, and that I'm much more likely to sell when things are looking up and I'm still feeling good about msyelf (SELL HIGH!) than I am to do so when things are going down because of how emotional I get (maybe set stop limits?)
Also some other things going on that are making October difficult: I keep just missing buses and trains; the timing is just off. Like I am coming up on the train and it's in view, but it just goes by before I get there. To me, as most know, that's one of the worst feelings: I very much dislike getting delayed. I'm sure it's not that extreme and I'm exaggerating the frequency of it, but in September it felt like it never happened, and in October it feels like it's happening all the time.
I can't wait for this month to be over. Why does it have to be a 31-day month?
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