Roller Coaster Ride

The last couple of years have been a little worrisome. As it turns out, the career path that I chose for myself about 35 years ago has just about evaporated over the last 10 years. Two things have happened. There has been tremendous consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry and there has been a wholesale swapping out of the chemistry research labor force from an fairly diverse American base to a less diverse Chinese base at about 1/5 the cost per person. As a chemistry researcher, I got consolidated and swapped over a year ago. But that's not what this is about.

I recently found a part-time, work-at-home job as a Scientific Review Officer. I work for a company that manages the review of proposals submitted for research grants issued by a federal program run through the Department of Defense. Most of the funding is related to breast cancer research. Anyhow, what that means is that I'm at my computer a lot during the day. But that's not what this is about.

Not being from the landed gentry, over the years it became apparent that If I didn't want to eat dog food for the last few years of my life, I needed to save a bit. So I have tried. As it turns out, I've tried to take a long view of things and rather than put all my savings into mattresses or mason jars, I've put a good chunk of it into the stock market. I'd say it's about 2/3's in indexed mutual funds of various kinds including broad market, small cap, international etc. About a 1/3 is in various stocks that I or my wife have picked up over the years. Warren Buffet is handling about 8%. A little investment in Apple 21 years ago has grown to about 10%. There is a spattering of bonds and cash thrown in for good measure.

So, I watch it. Daily. And I track it. And I measure it against other indicators. I look for correlations and causes and effects. I am a scientist after all. The one thing that seems to remain fairly constant is the ratio of my net worth to the Dow. I guess it makes sense.

So the point of this story is that I was sitting at home at the computer yesterday, working at recruiting scientific reviewers as part of my part-time job and watching the stock market every once in a while. It's not been so good for the last week or two. Quite volatile and mostly down. I follow the market on the Google Finance page. Around 2:30 it was looking like another bad day with all the leading indicators pointing down. To get the latest numbers, I often hit the refresh button. Around 2:40 I hit the refresh button. Wow! It dropped from -300 to -400! I hit refresh again. Down another 100! Again. 150 more! Again. Another 150 or so. The market was in free fall! This was crazy. While this was happening, Apple was also dropping like a rock, only faster. Then I got excited. Buying Opportunity!!! Well, as the Dow hit down about a 1000 points, and Apple dropped below 200, everything basically quit working. It took forever to log into Fidelity and even the Google Finance page was refreshing real slow. And just like a rubber ball hitting pavement, all the indicators started moving up again. And unfortunately, just like a rubber ball, they never came back up to where they were dropped from. So the bottom line is that I didn't do anything. I just went along for an exciting ride.