Two Weeks, Two Tragedies: Buffalo and Uvalde Mass Shootings

Years ago I created the tag The Tragedy of the Week on my blog. My first use was in December 2012, in the wake of the Newtown school shooting. My intent was sardonic humor. Tragedies involving innocent young people killed by guns, such as in school shootings, were becoming so common that they seemed to happen every week. It wasn't meant to be literal!

The past two weeks, though, have seen two major mass-shooting tragedies. Last week, on Saturday, May 14, a gunman shot 13 people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. 10 people died. Example news coverage: CNN article updated May 18.

This week, on Tuesday, May 24, a gunman walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and barricaded himself in a classroom. He killed a whopping 21 people, including 19 children around the age of 10 years old, and injured 17 more. Example news coverage: Forbes article updated May 26.

I'll have more to say about these events, a lot more, soon.

"The Market is Down 20%"? I'm Not!

"Has anyone noticed recently the market is down 20% this year?" a manager asked on a sales team call this morning. It was a rhetorical question, of course. B2B salespeople are very aware of economic news, and the stock market tumbling this year has only been news, like, every day this year.

I thought about disagreeing with him. "After this week's partial recovery this week I'm only down 4-5% YTD," I would have said. "Plus today looks like it'll another up day!"

I didn't say either of those things, of course. I agreed with the point he was making and didn't want to dispute it, even with facts. Plus, my 4-5% figure was based on a fresh calculation I did last night on one of my own financial spreadsheets. My performance could be better or worse than the market average.

"Okay, so how am I doing compared to the market?" I wondered. I looked at a year-to-date (YTD) chart for a benchmark.



A fresh look at the S&P 500 chart YTD shows that the broad market is not down 20% since the start of the year. At market close today (the blue tag in the chart above) it's down just a hair over 15% for the year. Granted, the past few days have been up days on the market. But even the index's YTD low of 3900.79 last Thursday, May 19, was just 18.2% below where it closed Dec 31, 2021. So it was never "The market is down 20%!" but "The market is down almost 20%." 😆

Then there's my personal calculation of being down 4-5%. If that's accurate it means I'm doing pretty well. So I assumed it was inaccurate until I checked it two more times this afternoon. 😅

Well, given that today was an "up" day my number changed. It now indicates a loss of just 3.0% YTD, a smaller loss than yesterday. And it's accurate. So I'm doing well!