So for most people, the credo to live by when dealing with stocks, mutual funds, and other market investments is simply to buy low and sell high. It seems though whenever make a transaction, I seem to do the exact opposite. Well it seems fitting. After all, in my opinion, playing the market is pretty much akin to gambling. And historically I have always sucked at gambling, so there you have it.
Early Halloween day, Charles Schwab deposited my $5,000 withdrawal from my retirement IRA into my checking account. As you can see by the graph above, it's almost like Wall Street knew that I had just done what I did and decided right there and then to immediately have the market start a sharp rise. So rather than reaping the benefits of having a greater position being able to take better advantage of my more robust NAVs, the gains happen after I lessen my exposure. But, I guess I'm not complaining too horribly since the gains have been so good in the past couple weeks that as you can see, as of today, I've surpassed the amount I took out, especially today where I had almost a 2% gain boosting my account by a little over a thousand bucks. If only every day could be like today.
So it's like I never took the $5,000 out of my account. That's the positive way I should be looking at this of course. I shouldn't be groaning saying that had I waited a little bit more, the account would be up past $56,000. I got to stay on the bright side of this. It really be nice if the market starts regaining its losses in 2024 so that I'd be able to make back the future $15,000 in withdrawals allocated in my 2024 budget.
Is that too much to hope for? It's not greedy, it's very modest. And very much needed in these trying financial times.