My last blog post was more than a month ago and I honestly couldn’t think of a more polite way to word the title of my latest blog post. The biggest news is that my wife is pregnant with another boy and gynae visits and expenses started to pile up. My wife and I got busier with work, our boy started falling sick more frequently and is in the process of transitioning from half-day to full-day preschool. Which also means schools fees went up. We started going back into the office even more so transport and time costs increased too.

Right when I’m trying to manage all these family, personal and professional matters, the stock and crypto markets tanked. Much worse and looking like it will be more prolonged than what I have gone through before so my averaging down investment strategy didn’t work well at all. The tech stock market took the brunt of it and the fall was brutal across the board so all of my positions got battered. The crypto market was just as bad and the same thing happened. In fact, a certain crypto position got wiped out and will most probably never recover. Just because everyone is talking about it online, I’m going to name it – LUNA.

I didn’t have a big LUNA crypto position but what I saw in those few days this week made me re-evaluate my entire crypto investment strategy. That’s how much fear it put in me. Not because of the losses I made on my LUNA crypto position but because of how little I could do and how slow i was to respond. I was shell-shocked, reverted to my averaging down investment strategy because that’s what I know before realising the entire thing is about to blow up. By then, I was too late to react and got stuck with the losses. It was incredibly unsettling and really made me think about what I was doing.

It’s not the same with tech stock market. At least I know and understand the reason for why they are going down. I will probably take bigger losses from my positions there despite averaging down but I’m prepared for it because I knew what I was getting into. Besides, there’s a business underlying the stock to analyse and I can still see whether the conditions are deteriorating or improving. Meaning I have time to think, wait, decide to enter or exit. With crypto, your decision making window is much smaller and it could mean the difference between wiping out the position or a subsequent recovery that could multiple your gains even more. The stakes are high either way but the investment risk management framework is totally different between the tech stock and crypto markets.

While my overall portfolio risk management framework still worked in that losses from the tanking tech stocks and crypto positions did not cause an unrecoverable hit to my investments, I have to assess what I did wrong and learn from it. This is going to be even tougher now as I deal with ever increasing family, person and professional matters especially with another boy on the way. I better get my act together now while my wife and I are still in our 30s. As we go into our 40s, I’m hoping for an improved approach to this as I gain more investing experience. Now I get why they say bull and bear market cycles shape the investor. Surviving and thriving each cycle means you live to fight another day.

It has been an eventful few weeks for many reasons. I started going back to the office once a week to work while it’s 3 days a week for my wife. We had to adjust the routines to ensure our boy still gets dropped off and picked up from his morning half-day at the preschool. On days when we are both in the office, my parents-in-law go with my helper to pick him up. It’s a lot more of schedules juggling and errands running than before. Didn’t help that he was sick for a number of days and couldn’t go to preschool at all. It took us a few weeks to get to a point where we are more comfortable with the new routines but the situation is always changing as he grows up.

Anyway, the tech stocks & ETFs and cryptos markets tanked during the same time as well. While I was actively averaging down on my existing positions, I was also increasing my Dollar Cost Averaging amounts into them. I find that this investment strategy works well when the markets are volatile and have daily or weekly big swings in price movements. Despite my increased investments into the tech stocks & ETFs and cryptos, the value of my investment portfolio continues to fall with each week. This is to be expected during a time of bloodbath in the markets like now. Not looking to my end of month liquid assets update as my Google Sheet is currently showing my first significant drop in total liquid assets for the past 2 years.

The question is how long can the tech stocks & ETFs and cryptos markets keep falling and whether I can keep up with my investment strategy – manual averaging down and automated Dollar Cost Averaging of positions. It’s always in a bear market that I realise the importance of active income flow. As long as I don’t lose my job and continue to receive my monthly salary income, it’s possible for me to ignore the gyrations in the markets and stick to my approach. In fact, the longer and more sustained the fall in the markets is, the greater the benefit to me as a long-term asset accumulator. Because I can get these assets at lower prices now than before.

The next consideration is the effort required to maintain our jobs and the monthly salary income. If they are a big mental and physical drain, it doesn’t matter what the pay is if we don’t at least enjoy some parts of our work days. To be honest, we find work stimulating enough to keep going at it. Our jobs now are at an almost permanent flexible work from office/home arrangement basis. Meaning we work in the office on certain days (by choice or coordinating with our colleagues) and we work at home on other days. So I get to have the social and professional interaction with my colleagues in the workplace while being able to switch off from the demands at home. Balanced out with actually being at home the rest of the time so I can run errands and spend time with my family. This makes corporate jobs in the office much more bearable than before when we were stuck in the office 5 days a week with no flexibility and tons of wasted face & transport time.

When I started the new year 2022, I was getting ready to gear up and move jobs or gun for a promotion. My wife had went through a big restructure and changed jobs twice in the past 2 years. Her career trajectory has gone up and is stable now so I figured it was my turn to step up. But we got some big news recently on the personal front that is making me change my mind. There’s a chance our family has to go through another major transition in the later half of the year. And she’s going to need a lot more support from me than before. I doubt I can provide that in the midst of getting busier at work if I change jobs. It’s also going to impact the move-in timetable to our new place (factoring in the higher renovation costs and increased time taken due to worker shortages). I don’t want to get squeezed on both ends managing professional and personal issues at a time when she needs stability more so than ever. I will try to keep posting on my blog about these updates but as you can see, it’s already reducing the time I have to write. Let’s watch this space!