"The Market is Down 20%"? I'm Not!
May. 26th, 2022 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalker"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!
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!
