A 30% Market Decline? Keeping Perspective. #215

"Daddy, the lady at dancing class had toes coming out of her eyes and coming out of her ears!".

That's what 4 year-old Emily told me yesterday through rampant giggles, and I'm not one to disagree with her! One big observation of recent years as a parent - is the wonderfully wild imaginations that kids can have. Depending on what they may have been absorbing recently, whether it's Harry Potter stories or something lighter, such as 'Cocomelon' nursery rhymes, their minds can take a perfectly mundane daily event or encounter and turn it into a wild and scary thing. It's a wonderful privilege to see and hear it in action. The tangible impact of their imagination running mad are little or none, at least in the short term! The imagination does not usually cause an action or event to occur.

However, the same cannot be said of the imagination of us adult investors, particularly in the face of actual horrific world events, and subsequent detailed coverage of market movements. Reading the home page of any media outlet over the past week may well have had you terrified about your finances, even on days when the markets movements were up! That is their intention - to keep you clicking and reading. Clicks = Revenue, never forget!