I bought just at the right time to ride the trend back up again. Feel good, man.
Apparently not, down another percent today. I'm buying this dip all the way down. Best case scenario for me is a six month slide followed by two more years of depressed prices before we start back up again. I would buy tickets for that ride every single week.
Is it wrong of me to be rooting for the next recession to happen sooner rather than later?
Sol, I am with you on that one. Would love for this too happen and blow over before end of 2017 ;-)
The problem with all of this is that for most people, their income source is correlated with the strength of the economy; a recession that lowers stock prices won't benefit such people if their income is reduced or they lose their job, and thus don't have income to invest and may even need to pull money out of savings to cover expenses.
What we should really be hoping for is a sustained drop in equity valuations, which doesn't in and of itself require a weaker economy. If you think about in terms of price and earnings, we want a drop in the P/E ratio but not necessarily a drop in the denominator (as would happen in a recession). Basically, we should be hoping for sentiment towards investing in stocks to fade.
I'm not sure how likely sentiment is to change, given how easy it is for anyone to invest in the market via passive funds these days, how much information is out there, and how widespread the belief is that stocks will always do well over time. People in our generation have witnessed downturns, but every time there has been a dip the correct response has been to immediately buy the dip. Given the severity of the crisis, the recovery from the 2008-2009 recession happened incredibly quickly. My guess is, the only way that sentiment towards stocks can really change is a market crash that goes uncorrected for a long period of time; like we saw over the 1929-1950 period. Such a move would kill the optimism that many have towards stocks and as such result in higher expected returns for those who continue to invest.