Macro Minute: Week of November 20, 2023

Today, I want to talk about something non-markets again. This week is Thanksgiving and I know that the holiday season can be tough for people. For that matter, life can be very difficult all together sometimes. I also know that at 40 I do not have life figured out, but I have lived an interesting life and I try and observe things along the way. The topic I would like to explore today is contentment.

In my observations of people and from my own experience, I find that people are the happiest when they are content. Being content does not mean that life is going great. In some cases, people find contentment while in the middle of some of the most stressful situations. I will speak from my own experience on this. I recall being on the side of Interstate 59 calling out to God for peace. Over the next weeks as I went through the funeral of my parents and figuring out the last year of high school and learning how to adult, I had a sense of contentment and peace. I don’t know how I had contentment through that. I have heard the saying “God takes care of fools and babies” and maybe at that time I resembled a bit of both.

So, over this week, I challenge you to sit back and reflect on the blessings you have in your life. It may be family, memories of family now past, or the hope about what is to come. Finding contentment will help overcome the anxieties that life bombards us with every day. I know it’s the American way to look at others and want what they have, but finding a sense of contentment in our lives truly does bring greater happiness.

Obviously, this mindset can help us in our portfolios too. Being content that the market has basically gone nowhere for two years. Whether you were in a diversified portfolio that went down 11% in 2022 before gaining 6% in 2023 or the Nasdaq that lost 33% in 2022 before gaining 35% 2023. In both cases they have netted close to nothing over two years, and sometimes in markets you have to find contentment in knowing just that.

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