In June, our net worth fell by 5.93% in USD and 3.04% in EUR to $115,344 and €110,695 respectively. Liquid net worth was at $83,151/€79,800.
The Bear Market
The S&P 500 officially entered a bear market in June, but this has felt like a bear market to me for awhile. I was holding stocks like Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Paypal, and Cloudflare from 2021 into 2022, and they're down much more than 20%. It's funny: I knew holding that stuff was really risky, but I couldn't see a way out. I didn't want to sell and pay taxes, so I just held and watched money evaporate. Dumb.
However, even when I did sell, I'd often buy shares in a different company that hadn't started falling yet but inevitably would. For example, if I sold Cloudflare or Square I'd put the money in Amazon. So there was this sense that there was nowhere to run: stay in the name and lose money or sell to buy something "safer" and still lose money.
The names in my individual stock portfolio have gotten progressively more boring. One advantage is that they aren't nearly as correlated, even though on the really bad days, they still all fall together. But at least it's not one big tech trade, which rises or falls based on how the world is viewing tech as a whole.
Painful as this has been, I have learned a lot:
- Be careful of correlations.
- Valuation eventually does matter.
- Paying taxes is better than a crash.
Lastly, this experience has convinced me that most of my money should be in a basket of diversified ETFs, where single stock risk won't wreck my day.
Options Trading
In June, I bought and sold my first options contracts. This is small potatoes, but I bought a call option and sold it the same day, and I'm holding on to a few puts on the overall stock market.
I've long wanted to be able to buy this kind of insurance on my portfolio, but I just didn't follow through with my broker. That said, because it's new, and because it's risky, I don't want to commit a lot of money to this. I remember on Reddit's /r/Wallstreetsbets when there were a few weeks of easy gains for the guys who bought weekly calls on SPY. Inevitably a bunch of other people followed and bet huge sums only to see their options expire worthless.
I recognize the risk that goes along with options trading, and I'll size accordingly.
Life in Germany Right Now
The other day, my wife and I along with a group of others assisted a Ukrainian family move in to a new home. They obviously don't know anyone, so organizations have sprung up to help house them. The family, like many such families coming to Germany, consisted of a mother and her children: the men tend to stay behind in Ukraine.
During this last week, the power company Uniper said that they might need financial assistance from the Bundesregierung due to rising gas prices in addition to lower gas flows from Russia. As I wrote in my last piece, we were asked by our local power company to pay more for our electricity due to the current price realities. When we first moved in, our electricity was around 24 cents per kWh vs. the 39 cents we're now paying. Electricity prices have always felt high here, but now every click of a light bulb or every drop of warm water feels consequential.
The whole situation is unsettling, and it's only summer now: few people use air conditioning here. What happens in the winter when we're all cranking up the heat? I don't know.
There are shortages too, though they're limited to specific items. For example, my employer told us to conserve paper due to a paper shortage. Canola oil in Germany is now basically a distant memory.
Weird as it may sound, I've begun asking myself what event would cause me to buy some plane tickets and bail on Germany. My usual trigger is something like the war expanding into other countries or hitting a NATO country.
I don't want to leave though. It's really a very pleasant country to live in. So let's hope for some kind of peaceful resolution to this violent madness.
Forecasting
My wife and I will be leaving this week to enjoy our summer vacations. We're going to France, so there's clearly still plenty of fun to be had in Europe, despite the present reminders of hardship. Afterwards I'll be flying to the US. I need to hug my family members and, ahem, log into my US accounts from the address I claim as my residence (haha).
And with a vacation comes expenses, but it also comes with my employer's summer bonus. So I've sent off a lot of money - for me - to the various savings account, and I think I've set aside enough for the two of us to enjoy ourselves. My wife also needs a new computer, so that will take a bite out of us.
Until next time, take care. Enjoy yourself in whatever way makes you happiest.
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