The market is a beautiful thing, don’t you think?

We got the post-2020 boom. Brilliant, everyone gets their money, everyone reaps the benefit, hurray! 

Then 2022 happened and everything turned to shit. People in the US decided not to return to work after being brutally laid off during the pandemic, making firms BEG for them to come back by increasing wages, only for them to say, “Screw you, I can make much better at tiktok. Besides, Trump gave me a sh*t ton of money, why should I bother going back to corporate slavery?? That’s on YOU capitalism!!” Unanticipated QE announcements during historically high inflation? A potential Plaza Accord 2.0? An emerging market debt crisis? Welcome to the bear market, it WILL get worse than this.

Unfortunately, my life has been moving in tandem with the market. Perhaps, like the Fed, I too, missed the signals. Whenever I think that I’ve gotten the worst, oh boy, this is only the beginning. But the good thing about growing up is that, you get better at admitting that the reason to your downfall is truly, your own doing.

And perhaps it is at this moment, when you’re at the bottom, is when you get to see what went wrong. Predicting the market at this point indeed feels like catching a falling knife. The thing about life is that, I am not in control of it, God is. Perhaps it is true, the happiness comes only a while and you’re in the clouds. Then bam, you get slammed to the ground again, and my falling knife stage starts here. The people around you can only do so much. But it’s up to you to decide whether you can bounce back or not.

But oh well, now that I am in the bearish part of my life, I will take the time to let the knife fall. But when it hinges to the ground, that’s when I can get hold of it, and carve a life as someone whose smarter and wiser (hopefully).

And one day, I hope to be able to say, “phew, I survived this.”