Personal thoughts - October 2023
I've decided to start a monthly commentary of the recent market levels, the state of the economy as per my reading of global news and provide a summary and a personal thought of the current state of affairs. I've been doing that in a short regular journal in an Excel file for myself. It provides me a very useful account of my thoughts and the reason of my various financial decisions at the point of writing. I reckon it'll help me in the future, as a review of how I was wrong or correct, and serves a reminder to my future self on why I should always be passively invested at most times, and hopefully all the time . As of writing on 8th October, the market had suffered a mini drawdown. S&P retraced to 4300 levels, with YTD gains of ~12%. Nasdaq pulled back to 13400 levels with YTD gains of ~28%. Forward PE from WSJ is 19.2 and 21.1 respectively. Both at slightly elevated levels, meaning valuation is not cheap. Of course, as we will eventually understand, no one can predic