If you sell your stocks now, you’re likely doing so at a loss.
In 2022, the S&P 500 closed down nearly 20%, its worst performance in 14 years. The technology index, Nasdaq 100, performed even worse at minus 28% on the year.
By the end of 2022, I started seeing more reports in the media about how individual investors stopped investing. Trading activity and net inflows started to go down.
In a WSJ article, one of those individual traders said:1Source: The Wall Street Journal
“It was fun for a while, things were going up and down pretty fast.”
The latter part is when people start to lose interest. Here are the different stages of stock prices:
During the Collapse Stage, people usually get out because every investor has a breaking point.
