FYI: December was an awful month for stocks.
The S&P 500 fell up to 15% at one point, culminating in the Christmas Eve shellacking which saw stocks fall almost 3% a day after they had fallen 2%. Stocks did rally more than 6.5% from that point until the end of the month.
All told, the S&P was down almost 9% for December and fell 19.8% from the end of September through the close on Christmas Eve.
A family member joked on Christmas he was going to have to sell his house to make ends meet now that the stock market was crashing.
Through the close on Thursday, the S&P has now rallied more than 15% off the lows.
I’m guessing this relief rally has to make stock investors feel much better about themselves but this didn’t have to be the way things worked out. In an alternate universe, stocks continued to crash or stayed volatile and went nowhere, offering little hope for investors looking for a reprieve from the selling.
Here’s what these different paths may have looked like:
Regards,
Ted
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2019/02/stock-market-counterfactuals/
