Oh, no! All of my stocks are down! Oh, yes! All of my stocks are up! Everything is red, or everything is green, means it probably isn’t about you. Personal finance is personal, but markets don’t care about people, they don’t care about us. In a diversified portfolio on a day when the stock market is open, there will usually be stocks that are up, and some that are down. When they are all up or all down, it might be caused by luck, or because the market is having a mood swing. Mood swings can be hard to ignore, but such is the reality of investing in stocks.

Friends who follow how I invest sometimes call up with support or congratulations. I know I surprise some because I generally do not get emotional about it. “You must’ve made a ton of money!” Yes, that’s worth celebrating, but I don’t make it until I sell it. “Ouch! Did you just lose a bunch of money?” Yes, but not really, because I don’t sell simply because things are down. And yet, I watch my stocks every day. My stocks are stories about companies run by people. Those dramas are real, affect my life, and are far more fascinating than videos.

When I see that all of my stocks are one way or the other, I glance at their news, just in case; but particularly lately, I check the global news for outbursts, policy shifts, and wars. One mis-spoken comment can crater market sentiment. An interest rate change can drive markets up or down before anything has directly affected all of those companies. Tracking a company’s progress is difficult. I give up at trying to track governments (though I will speculate, largely for entertainment.)

“The Nasdaq Composite returned 336% over the last decade, compounding at 15.8% annually.” – NASDAQ

That screenshot of one of my portfolios more positive days had a few stocks rising over 7%. That’s under the 15.8%, so that’s normal, right? No. The market is open for about two hundred days a year. 7% return for 200 days would be a 752931% return. Even a 15% return in a year is exemplary, but would represent a fraction of a percent per day. I wouldn’t turn it down, but I considered QBTS’ recent 4,000% period to be unsustainable. I cheered it on, sold to cover my investment, then sold to realize a profit (which I’ll be paying taxes on shortly.) I’ll be surprised if it ‘only’ went up 15% in 2026, but I am an optimist and am willing to let my leftover profits ride the rise. 

Long Term Buy and Hold (LTBH) means I buy and hold for the long term, or until I need the money, or until I think the company and the stock are no longer growing.

But when I check my portfolio and see that everything is up or everything is down, then I’m more likely to do nothing. I can’t predict a stock, so I certainly can’t predict an entire market.

And then these recent years showed up. Since 2017, the NASDAQ has only had three years that were less than a 20% return. All green can happen randomly. All green significantly above average feels bubbly to me. I may not do anything about it, but I will prepare my emotional response to realize the possibility of lots of red. Those possibilities in my portfolio won’t be because I picked right or wrong, but because there were world events that swung the markets. 

Why not sell everything? Rarely do entire markets rise without limit or fall to zero. Within market ups and downs are stocks that went the other way. During The Great Recession (The Second Great Depression), the market was going down while my portfolio was going up thanks to DNDN and AMSC. My personal misfortune happened as two sets of now-convicted criminals devastated the companies, those stocks, and my portfolio. They were found guilty. I have only started to recover. If it wasn’t for the crooks, well, I wouldn’t have lost more than a decade of my life.

I suspect that 2026 will be more volatile than any year when I’ve been invested. Politics, social unrest, climate change, and artificial intelligence are all destabilizing. They aren’t waiting decades to become news. Each will have several opportunities to make mayhem with money matters. 

I’ll continue to watch my stocks, and the news, and the world. I may only have to sell one stock, maybe two, this year; and they may be partial shares. But I intend to not take my personal finances personally, as usual.