This time of year, we get nostalgic and review the events from the prior year. Every major news agency condenses 365 days of activity, 8,760 hours of action, into a 3 or 4 minute highlight reel.
Before we get to the ugly of 2008, here are a few of the ‘gems’ that I like:
-Despite a season ending knee injury, Tiger Woods gutted it out at the US Open, winning his 14th major second on the all time majors win list only to Jack Nicklaus who has 18. Tiger was runner up for player of the year in spite of playing only half a year on one functioning leg.
-23 year old Michael Phelps dominated the news out of the Beijing Olympics by winning a record 8 gold medals. An amazing accomplishment for a kid who couldn’t sit still in elementary school (he was eventually diagnosed with ADHD), was picked on mercilessly by his classmates because of his scrawny build and big ears, and was prone to fits of whining and crying.
-Bigfoot claims are a dime a dozen, and there was no particular reason to believe this one. But Rick Dyer and Matt Whitton seemed so sure: “Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words,” predicted Whitton confidently at a press conference, in which the pair of amateur Bigfoot hunters claimed they had found the corpse of a Sasquatch in the woods of northern Georgia. More than that, they claimed to have the body itself, releasing photos of what appeared to be a mass of matted hair and bloody flesh stuffed into a large freezer. As the “evidence” thawed, though, researchers revealed that “Bigfoot” was, in fact, a rubber gorilla suit stuffed with road kill and other animal remains. Days later Dyer and Whitton, who was fired from his job as a police officer as a result of the hoax, said they had intended the stunt as a joke all along; as Dyer told a CNN affiliate, “Everyone knew we were lying.”
-After his wife left him, Ian Usher decided to make a clean break from his old existence as a rug salesman in Perth, Australia. So he took the next logical, if extreme, step, and put his entire life up for sale on eBay. On the auction block, sold only as a package, were Usher’s three-bedroom house, his 1989 Mazda sedan, a jet ski, his computer, his furniture, an introduction to his friends and a tryout at his sales job. The bids rolled in and Usher, 44, ended up collecting around $380,000. He later said he had hoped his life would sell for more, but he still had enough to finance phase II of his unusual midlife crisis, embarking on a massive trip around the world to complete a hundred life goals in a hundred weeks, a project he’s blogging about online.
One of my favorite writers/humorists ever, Dave Barry had this take on 2008:
2008 was a weird year:
· O.J. actually got convicted of something.
· Gasoline hit $4 a gallon – and those were the good times.
· On several occasions, “Saturday Night Live” was funny.
· There were a few days in October when you couldn’t completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury Secretary would be Joe the Plumber.
· And most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who – despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States – was neither a Bush nor a Clinton.
Now onto the ugly – as you know, in 2008 most of the ugly was financial and market related (Source: Bloomberg, January 3, 2009)
· The S&P 500 never turned positive during the entire year. The index opened the year at 1468.36 and closed the first day at 1447.16 and never looked back, looked back up that is. The index finished the year down 38.5%, the steepest drop since 1937.
· Billionaire Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. dropped 32% as the recession forced the value of the firm’s equity holdings and derivative bets downward. That was the firm’s worst performance in more than 3 decades.
· 2008 saw the largest bankruptcy and bank failures in US History. Financial institutions experienced write downs and losses of $720 billion and $30.1 trillion of market valuation was wiped out.
How did 2008 treat you financially?
If you experienced financial pain, it might be time to consider investment portfolios that utilize exit strategies*.
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Securities offered through USA Advanced Planners (Member FINRA/SIPC). Advisory services offered through USA Wealth Management. USA Advanced Planners and USA Wealth Management are affiliated companies. The opinion expressed herein is that of the writer and not necessarily that of USA Wealth Management and/or USA Advanced Planners.
· Exit strategies are employed to lock in a profit or prevent a significant loss by determining at what point an investment will be sold. No exit strategy will be 100% accurate. Having an exit strategy does not guarantee a profit and/or guarantee against loss.
