The Ups and Downs

A great example of market ups and downs happened today. GameStop (GME) shared their Q1 reports today with lots of things to be happy about. They saw new hardware sales up by 25%, new software sales up 8%, digital sales up 3%, collectibles up 39%, and posted that they expect full-year EPS of 3.10-3.32 points. One would think with all of these positive earning results that they would see a massive price increase but instead Mr. Market decided to rear its ugly head and slam the stock in after hours for a total of -6.3%.

It's time like these that remind me that as much as one may try to predict the market, they can only do so much. And when that happens it's incredibly important for each investor to return to the books, blogs, and teachings that can reassure us that we are still moving forward with whatever certainty we can obtain through financial reports, investor sentiment, and general good-luck guessing. After all, we all have had or will have a day on Wall Street where this kind of shenanigans hits.

It's not for lack of trying to time or beat the market. It's just that investing is hard. There is a science to picking stocks but there is also a lot of luck and for those that believe in the efficient market theory, days like today prove that you really can't predict everything. The market will do what it wants to do and in the fashion that it wishes to do it. That being said, Bloomberg machine or not, we are all a little more humbled when we get taken for a brain-melting and head spinning trading day like GameStop (GME) saw today.

The Importance of Watching

Watching the market can be a giant and a lot of the time stressful task. Investors who have been at the game for many years who have become dulled to the ups and downs of the market can even be tricked by it a few times even though they've seen it so many times before. For an untrained eye however, it becomes all that much more important to watch the fluctuations of the market almost daily.

I was having a chat with one of my buds over our weekly work outs and I found myself giving him a piece of advice that I shouldn't have. Being a new investor, he has been digging his heels in and absorbing as much information as possible from me and other trained sources. This means that he is even more susceptible to listening to all that I have to say since I have been in the market for a little over two years now and I've gotten a pretty