Do you remember the lost decade of stocks from 2000-2009? The market basically made no gains for those years. Many are predicting that but there's always a bull to follow too.

"So, now consider total returns — price movement plus dividends: since 1925, only 7 per cent of rolling 10-year S&P 500 total returns were flat or negative."

https://www.thenationalnews.com/busi...ually-bullish/
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I just calculated our most recent ten-year average (assuming no change in December), and it comes out to 8.6 percent per year, which is kind of average. I was curious what it would be given the volatility of the last few years.
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I think there is still a fair amount of risk in the market. I've seen some rather troubling statistics on consumer debt, especially in the lower income individuals in the country that is pretty horrifying. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's something that can cascade. I'm not educated enough to know.

I think there are major structural issues in real estate. I know there has been a lot of real estate bought on leverage, REITs, commercial, side hustles pushed by YouTube Finance bros, etc, and the numbers just don't work at 9% interest. Anywhere. Maybe it's no more than normal, maybe it's a swath of commercial real estate that is vastly under capitalized.

The other thing that is worrisome, and will remain for awhile is that I'm concerned that our society isn't good for high interest mortgages. Mortgages rates haven't been in the same universe as this since 9/11. That means there is 20 years of rates half this. I think I read it was 1995 since rates were this high. That means that nobody under 50 has ever even had the opportunity to be in the housing market in this kind of environment. And the world was far different then than now. That is a major structural change that was quite abrupt and we may not have seen all the repercussions yet.

The other thing that could make this thing get real ugly real fast is if the labor market softens. Every talking head couldn't help but crow about how the labor market was strong and there couldn't be a recession with a strong labor market. I think we've seen in Silicon Valley it doesn't take a load of layoffs to soften a labor market. That thing falls out of bed, even a little bit, I think it could have tremendous cascading results.

Obviously I hope none of that comes to pass, but those are the risks I see.
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I've been back trading options, mostly calls and its bern a good month.

SHOP has been good to me.
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The commercial real estate stuff is the big risk in my opinion. I could see a bad scenario where that sector collapses and starts taking banks with it. But I pay other people to solve those problems.
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That's free money!
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God fucking dammit!!!!

:-)
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My retirement accounts are at all time highs.

LFG!!!!!
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I haven't been actively trading anything, but in passing my brokerage account has seen a good bump.

I need to look and see what my retirement accounts are doing.
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This has been a great rally, and a great year overall. We had the painful drop in the third quarter, but the other three far more than made up for it.

And at my Christmas dinner this year, I'm going to give thanks for buying a lot of NVDA a couple of years ago.
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This recent vertical move is pretty insane. Almost no pullbacks for weeks on the indexes. Kind of insane.
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I'm sitting on a good chunk of cash currently, as a result of the VMW to AVGO acquisition. Looking to get that money back in the market, into a relatively safe investment available at Etrade. Suggestions?
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My financial guy pulled money out of stocks and into less risky places at basically the low point at the end of October.... and of course now or even a couple weeks ago it seemed dumb to just move back and forth, especially with all the speculation right now.

I might fire my financial guy.
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Ouch, that hurts. The markets turn on a dime, and you never know when the rally's going to hit. And if you miss it after absorbing the downside, it's painful.

My wife hired some paid advisors a few years back, and they did the same thing in 2020. I protested, but honestly it was kind of a muted protest given how bad the market was for a few months there. There was a month or two when I was wondering if the market was going to drop 80 percent before it stopped bleeding. It was her account so I'm not sure when they got her back into the market and how it turned out, but I can't imagine that they timed it perfectly in that weird time period, so I'm sure it ended up costing us some money in the long run.

I guess it made us feel a little better at the time that we weren't going to become paupers, so I'll admit that. But I was still protesting.
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How old are you? Are you playing defense or offense?

I've been banging the drum for CDs for a while now. Etrade has a 10-year CD at 5.0 percent and a 5-year CD at 5.3 percent, both with small banks. I've been spreading my money around at a bunch of different banks through the CD tools at the brokerages, so I don't know that I'd put a large amount of money in any of these tiny banks, but I don't think we'll see a 5.3 CD rate again for many years, and it's almost guaranteed to beat inflation.

If you're younger and still accumulating, that might be too conservative, but if you're courting retirement, it's a good safe way to beat inflation.

As far as stocks, I always struggle to recommend stocks, because I worry that I'll recommend a stock that's up when it's too late for other people, or that I'll recommend a stock that's down and it's down for a good reason. I'll look to see what I'm more bullish on, but I really have no expertise at all other than trying to link stocks to trends in society. I really don't do in-depth analysis of stocks other than looking at growth trends.
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