Stock Talk - Ep 144 - Investment Decisions - October 2018

There was a fair bit of hand wringing going into October, a month where there have been historically some iconic stock market meltdowns. The market was starting to show some signs of fatigue. At one point the S&P 500 index crossed below its 200 day moving average which hasn’t happened in literally years. Interest rates keep tracking up. The Mad King continued to elevate the trade trash talking and investors were getting nervous and stock prices in the early part were trending downward, but nothing crazy that motivated me to look into buying. Sue enough on October 23, the market had a fit. Suddenly words like “crisis” and “turmoil” were being thrown around, when historically they weren’t even scratches. It’s times like this where having my investing playbook is critical as it gives me an anchor to check in and review my investing ideology and how should be executing. It makes me review my Wish List to see if there are any stocks I’ve liked are now more affordable.  The last thing I should be doing is panicking and reacting. It’s these stress points where we need to be put all the upfront hard work and making thought-out decisions. 

In this episode I walk through the various decisions I made during the month. With quite a few stocks that I owned had fallen in value enough that I thought it was worth jumping in and buying some more shares to lower my average cost down. There were also a couple of stocks/ETF’s that I had on wish list that had become a lot cheaper and thought it would be good to start building a position.