Investing looking backward

 DISCLAIMER: You'd read a blog post from me for investment advice?  Are you out of your mind?

  I've been all stressed for a while about some of the individual stocks I've bought.  They seem to have done incredibly badly.

This was from looking at current price relative to what I paid for them.  And as the fella said, "Well, there's yer trouble!"

Like a lot of people, after getting my pandemic layoff, I had way too much time on my hands. And I finally bit the bullet and moved from a strictly-managed IRA to an account where I could buy individual stocks.  Then I bought a bunch of individual stocks I thought were good investments.

The heck of it is, I was right, they are good investments, most of them.

But I bought them when everybody and his cousin was doing what I was doing, buying individual stocks for the first time.  I also bought them during that period when the Fed was buying stocks, too, to keep the market from going down too much.  Neither of these are Bad Things.  But this made many of the stock prices go much higher than they normally run.  And yeah, that's when I bought them.

Well, after all that excitement, the Fed stopped doing what they were doing, and most folks went back to Normal Life.  And the prices of those stocks I'd bought?  Also went back to Normal Life.

So...

I went into my account and looked at the charts for some of my seemingly "worst" stocks.  After checking more recently (huge drops), I checked back three years.  And it turned out that before all the chaos, the price of the stock then was essentially the price of the stock now.  It's not low.  It's just normal again.

Eventually, give it a decade, say, some of those stocks might once again get back to what I paid.  At my age, I might not be around to see that.  So I sold the worst-looking ones (it's inside my IRA, so it's still what it is), and gradually I'm going to move the money to somewhere I like better.  And  I'll take that as a Learning Experience.

Doncha hate learning experiences?

-- Griz