As we finished January it looked like the stock market could do no wrong. Investors were all-in on stocks. Investor sentiment was downright giddy. Cash positions were at generational lows. Everything was awesome.

Then February arrived.

The first few weeks were dramatic. There were days when the Dow Jones Industrials were down 1500 points. 500-800 intraday swings were almost becoming normal after literally a year where there was nary a price change greater or less than 2 percent. There are so many reasons being cited. At the end it was a stressful month for investors.

For me it was shopping time.  I was looking to buy back into some broad market ETF’s but the price falls were not deep enough to justify. So I’m happy to wait. As bad as watching the markets go down 1000 points, the reality is it only represented a 2-4 percent drop. Put this into context, on Black Monday in 1987, the Dow Jones Industrials went down over 20 percent. THAT is a crash. What happened in February was a flesh wound…if that. Context. I had my list of stocks and it was just a matter of jumping on the one’s that were taking a big time beating. A few did pop up and I jumped in. 

I made quite a few moves and so I decided to break them down into a series of podcasts. In Part 1, I’ll share the decisions involving buying more shares of stocks and ETF’s I already own as well as selling. In Parts 2, 3, and 4 I will share my thought processes that went into buying some new stocks.

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