These market gains are nuts

[disneysteve]

As of market close today, our portfolio is up $304,000 year to date. That's just crazy to me. In under 5 months, we've earned more than I ever made in a year working. If I could easily pull out the gains since January 1, we'd have enough to live on for nearly 2-1/2 years.

To keep our asset allocation from getting too far out of whack, I've sold off about $92,000 worth of stocks and stock funds over the past 2-3 months. Even so, thanks to the surging market, our stock allocation is sitting around 62.25% with my goal being 60%. If the market continues to surge ahead, I'll rebalance more. I think +/- 2% is fine but much beyond that and I'd rather adjust some.

I hope everyone else is enjoying the strong market growth too.

[Drake3287]

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future.....

[kork13]

True to form, I haven't really noticed ... just not really paying attention on a frequent basis. But yeah, S&P 500 is ~12% up YTD, 29% up over 1YR. My personal portfolio is lower, but that's to be expected to some extent. The most recent inflation data has definitely cheered the market.

[bjl584]

Yes, my portfolio has been surging along with the markets.
Looks like I'm up more in the past month than I would earn by working in nearly 6.

[disneysteve]

True to form, I haven't really noticed ... just not really paying attention on a frequent basis.

You pay a lot more attention when you’re retiring in 3 weeks

Seriously though, everyone ought to take a look if you haven’t lately because you may find your asset allocation has gotten way off track. Unless you’re a 100% stock person, there’s a good chance your stock allocation is 5+% over your intended target. It may be time to rebalance.

[kork13]

You pay a lot more attention when you're retiring in 3 weeks

Yeah, that's probably fair... But really, Steve, if you had any doubts you wouldn't be retiring. You're in a great position, no need to stress about day-to-day the market swings!

Seriously though, everyone ought to take a look if you haven't lately because you may find your asset allocation has gotten way off track. Unless you're a 100% stock person, there's a good chance your stock allocation is 5+% over your intended target. It may be time to rebalance.

So I went in and checked, I'm actually running pretty close to my target AA. I was honestly a bit surprised ... maybe it's because I do stay fairly high on stocks (roughly 90/10, give or take), so there's less distance for them to run away with? At least currently, everything is within 3% of plan, and I normally only rebalance with a >5% difference (and, normally only look into it twice annually). I actually keep some of the "bond" portion as MM cash, so whenever I do need to reallocate, I typically just use the cash to buy more of what's needed.

[disneysteve]

Yeah, that's probably fair... But really, Steve, if you had any doubts you wouldn't be retiring. You're in a great position, no need to stress about day-to-day the market swings!

I'm certainly not stressing about it. Really the main reason I've been paying more attention is because, as I mentioned in another thread, I've been trying to consolidate our holdings and simplify things a bit. That just naturally has me looking at the spreadsheet more often. The other thing that changed is that I recently moved my spreadsheet from Open Office to Google Sheets. Now I have the values update automatically. Before I was doing it manually so I didn't see any change until I did an update. Now I can see the numbers change at any time during the day that I happen to look.

So I went in and checked, I'm actually running pretty close to my target AA. I was honestly a bit surprised ... maybe it's because I do stay fairly high on stocks (roughly 90/10, give or take), so there's less distance for them to run away with?

Yes, at 90% stock it's harder to move the needle than it is at 60% stock.

[srblanco7]

I've certainly noted. I did rebalance in our 401ks and I've been taking cap gains/dividend payments as well as my incentive comp and putting it to t-bills. Those things have kept us close to our target AA of 75/25.

I've been debating if that's too high an AA to stocks and perhaps we should ramp down to 70/30 or 65/35. However, when I look at it from a "bucket" perspective we have about 10 years of expenses in cash, bonds, and balanced funds, which gives me a level of comfort w/ our approach. In the meantime, I just leave it alone.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Dow hits 40,000 today. I got out of stocks at about 27,000 thinking a crash might happen. I’m taking my ball home and don’t want to play in this thread.

[ua_guy]

What's that saying...macroeconomists have accurately predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions. It will hit one day, but not today...the ride continues.

I'm heavy in stock and recently consolidated another old retirement account which I invested into my top 4 funds. Winning!

[disneysteve]

Dow hits 40,000 today. I got out of stocks at about 27,000 thinking a crash might happen. I’m taking my ball home and don’t want to play in this thread.

You mean market timing doesn’t work? What a shocker.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Ouch salt in the wound, lol.

[Randomsaver]

I started selling last week and is 80/20 now stock/cash.

[disneysteve]

I started selling last week and is 80/20 now stock/cash.

Is that a change from your previous AA or did you just rebalance to where you were already targeting?

I haven't changed my 60/40 target but I have sold some stocks to get us back closer to it.

[Randomsaver]

Is that a change from your previous AA or did you just rebalance to where you were already targeting?

I haven't changed my 60/40 target but I have sold some stocks to get us back closer to it.

I was 100% on SPY prior. Right now I hit 70/30 as it seems market is slowing down. Each day it's up, I plan to reduce stocks by 10.