Posted by It is late December, and the temperature is -9 F here in Minnesota. That is unusually cold for this time of the year. But, not as cold as the NASDAQ has been in 2022. With only a few trading days left, the index is near its low point for the year. The index has lost nearly 5500 points since the beginning of the year. Popular stocks like TSLA (down 69%), AMZN (down 51%) and NFLX (down 51%) are doing even worse. You would have done better if you held Nasdaq, Inc. (NDAQ), which is down only 10.62% YTD. They are actually well diversified. Nasdaq, Inc. owns and operates three stock exchanges in the United States: the Nasdaq stock exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and the Boston Stock Exchange, and seven European stock exchanges.
Nothing seems to be going right for stocks these days. It is scary to look at the charts and try to decide if a beaten down company is a good investment. As the stock market was going down this year, I would set up notifications to let me know when a stock price had dropped to a level that I thought was more reasonable. When my price target was reached, I would most often ignore the notice. My fear was that the price would continue to drop. For the few times that I did actually buy the stock, it would continue to drop in price. After that happened a few times, I decided to hold off on buying anything. During the year, when I sold an investment, I let the money sit is a treasury fund, rather than reinvesting in the stock market. By the end of the year, 50% of my portfolio was invested in treasury funds.
In my next retirement investing post, I will be looking at how much money I lost in 2022. It will also be a good time to look at monthly expenses. When a price increased, I would cut back on another expense if I could. Overall, I expect that my efforts to maintain a monthly budget are a bit short. This will determine if I need to increase the amount of retirement fund withdrawals for 2023. A major goal for 2023 is to pay off the remainder of my mortgage. This will save me about a thousand dollars in the second half of the year. The money to pay off the mortgage just means there is less money to invest elsewhere. It is looking more like people will lose jobs and there will be a recession in 2023. If that happens, the DOW could drop below 28,000 and the NASDAQ will be below 9,000 next year. Things usually get worse before they get better.