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Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Life and the Stock Market

Anyone who follows the stock market will sometimes feel the thrill of victory as the market spikes and other times the almost shock of defeat as it spirals down. Naturally, the ride, if that’s what we can call it, depends on the stocks we watch and the condition of our world. Some stocks buck the trends and continue to do well, even in a fragile or precarious economic market.

Right now, many of us feel like we’re riding the market train in the wrong direction with gasoline prices soaring (unless you have oil stocks), food costs ratcheting up at alarming rates, and even the weather in the Midwest is working against us with our farmers struggling to recover from the devastating floods covering the fields and ruining chances for a good crop.

Life, like the stock market can be thrilling or depressing, depending on where we find ourselves on any given day. Again, like the stock market, we can only see the trends if we look back and review where we’ve been, and then look ahead, and project where we want to be in the future.

The “spiking” times in our lives vary, depending on where we find ourselves. If you’re 10, a special trip or outing may give us a lifetime of memories to make us smile at any age. As we grow, the gains continue to appear on our chart: for a good grade in school, being selected for a sports team, playing in a recital, singing in a choir, getting a drivers license — the list, like a portfolio, is tailored to our particular situations.

Our life stocks can also go down, often for the reverse of the above mentioned list: a poor grade, never being selected for any team, being tone deaf and wanting to be in the choir, and flunking the drivers test, if we’re following those other examples.

As we age and our stocks mature, the stakes rise and with the rise come additional risks: choosing a career, choosing a partner for life, having children (they come without a manufacturer’s guarantee and can’t be returned), deciding to retire, and again, the list is truly endless.
The downward spirals seem to be more intense as well. We lose our job, we put our home on the market because we can’t afford the mortgage payment, our health reports, once rosy and robust, have become guarded and thriving has been replaced by surviving.

While we don’t — and shouldn’t — watch the markets every day because experts tell us not to do that, we do look back at the trends. Our life charts operate in much the same way, with incremental gains and losses hard to track every day, a look back at our trends can tell us where we’ve been, and with some thought and prayer where we might go in the future. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, and perhaps that’s a good thing, but the way we live our lives today can make our gains and losses in life — and both will occur — more bearable and possibly rewarding.