Posted by For the month of September, the DOW lost 1214 points. This puts the DOW up a meager 1.12% in the past 9 months, and up by 16.65% in the past 12 months. Interest and dividend income was $2224 for the month. Withdrawals for living expenses came to $1205 in the past month. So far this year, my investments have gained 3.30%. In the past month my investments are down by 2.32%. September was a bad month for anyone with money in the stock market. The threat of a government shutdown and political in-fighting did not help in any way. Although they did agree to a last-minute short term 45-day funding bill, we will most likely see this issue come up again before the end of the year. This will likely avert a major market meltdown in the near term but does nothing to restore investor confidence in our political leadership.
This past month I sold 50 shares of STLD for a small gain. I didn’t want to risk holding it into the last week of the month. I replaced STLD with 100 shares of PSI (Invesco Semiconductor ETF) at 42.52 per share. I added another 50 shares of QCLN at $41.89 to bring my average price down to $44.10 per share. It feels like a struggle to maintain positive cash flow in this environment. Despite earning $4198 in interest and dividends in the past two months, the market value of my investments declined by over $30,000. If I look past the last two months the numbers don’t look as bad, but it is hard to ignore recent poor market performance. When I had employment contributions to my 401K it was like automatically buying stock when the market was down. Now that I am trying to live off of the balance, you can’t help thinking about what you could have done differently to avoid lost value. The problem is that if you sell an investment, you no longer get the dividend.
Rite Aid the struggling retail pharmacy chain filed for bankruptcy on September 22, 2023. They sighted opioid lawsuits as a major factor in their bankruptcy. Because of the bankruptcy, Walgreens and CVS have seen their stock prices fall. Rite Aid has a 0.5 Starmine rating while Walgreens has a 0.8 rating. CVS is the best of the three with an 8.7 rating. Walgreens is down by -29.51% in the past year and CVS is down by -28.01%. It seems like every week I read about another lawsuit being filed against Walgreens for something they had no control over. I don’t know why anyone would want to be associated with retail pharma if there is no legal protection against egregious lawsuits. How are people going to get their prescriptions filled? Online pharmacies have to be more of a risk than getting a prescription filled in person. The opportunity to commit fraud is surely greater online. It is a problem that needs to be fixed or soon we will no longer have retail pharmacies in our communities.