nottellin wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 9:57 pm
flashheart wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 9:06 am
My dad lost $700k in the stock market in this. Worked so hard his whole life (not airlines). Total Alberta blue collar work horse Deserves every penny. But could not spend it. I gave him so much crap yesterday. He could have rented the nice cars on vacation, flown first class, treated his wife to glamourous meals, etc. Now it's gone. Could the market rebound? Time is not on his side.
If your dad was that close to retirement and he lost that kind of money, he was either being overly aggressive/greedy invested into that kind of volatility. Or he was extremely wealthy and invested conservatively and that's just the "small" hit his fixed income portfolio took.
I too had the exact same thought. The statement about "losing $700k" doesn't add up. To have a reasonably diversified portfolio drop by $700k you would have to have started with a couple million, in which case you would still have something valued like 1.5 million. The only way you could lose $700k in the last couple months is to have started with a truly massive amount in fixed income, and/or been 100% in individual equities. Which is fine, in fact desirable if you're young, riskier if you're middle-aged, and insane if you're approaching retirement age. Google "sequence of returns". (And "diversification"!!)
I'm not saying I don't believe the figure quoted, I'm saying it has me scratching my head. Having said that I do sympathize with the loss. It's well-established by psychologists that the pain of a loss is felt far more deeply than the pleasure of a gain.
Parkex wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 11:20 pm
Even the most conservative investor could have easily lost 50% of their portfolio. The stock market as a whole lost 70% in value so actually the average person who didn't sell anything lost 70%. This has nothing to do with volatility, it is a crash.
Completely bogus stat. The equities market has lost 20-30% roughly on aggregate (so far!). No truly conservative investor ie GIC's, bonds, has lost anything remotely like that.
And no...you haven't "lost" anything, except on paper, until you sell and lock in your losses. Much like you haven't "gained" anything when your house rises in value, until you sell it and lock in the gain. Lots of people gonna find out over the next year they're not really "richer than they think" when they go to sell their house.
I’m still waiting for my white male privilege membership card. Must have gotten lost in the mail.