COVID Anxiety on Investments

This coronavirus anxiety caused me to make these money mistakes. I’ve read that the swift and unprecedented spread of the COVID-19 outbreak has made the financial markets extremely volatile, leaving investors with huge losses in a short timeframe. I must admit when pandemic started, stocks and crypto went down and as an aggressive investor, it lead me to sell my shares. It give me literally losses and up to now, I’m doing no good. I’m having panic attacks thinking on what kind of investment is the right ting to do. There are also sleepless nights and its making me feel drained. What do you think should I do? I need help.

Oh no. :frowning: I’m so sorry you’re going through this. :frowning: I’m not a pro in psychology of traders or investors, but I would suggest taking a step back from looking into investments. For now, maybe you can focus on other things that could help get your mind off of these things. :frowning: Getting in the market again now and trying to regain everything you lost would be very difficult, especially if you’re being riddled by anxiety. :frowning:

Hi @Coeling,
First you have my empathy for your situation. This happened to me a few times in my earlier life, and at the time was devastating. One particular event that sticks in my mind was that a scammer managed to legally steal a car from me, and that relatively small loss tipped me over the edge into technical bankruptcy. It shut down my business (which I now know should have been shut down long before, and it took me 6 years of carrying a debt half the size of a UK mortgage to get back to break even.
That was probably the most valuable lesson I learned in life.

Over the years, I have found that my most valuable possession is an ability to do risk analysis of any choice I make when contemplating future investments, or trading, or stuff I decide to spend that I call “discretionary spending” or put another way - stuff you don’t need for survival.

Anyway, if you are having panic attacks thinking what kind of investment is the right thing to do, most people often forget the easiest decision of all, and that is the “do nothing” option. I am a business consultant, and sometimes in options analysis to determine a course of action moving a business from now to future it turns out that the best option to choose is “do nothing”. That means there is no justification for the original assumption that CHANGE will be positive. CHANGE without purpose (goals, objectives) can be damaging, and in extreme cases can bankrupt a company.

I am not advising to do nothing forever. Assuming you are not desperate for money required to pay bills, eat food, cloth yourself, everyone can afford to “do nothing” whilst you calmly elevate your mind to a different level - get out of the physical rat race and tell yourself that a hurried decision will most likely be a bad decision. Your mind needs some breathing space between March 2020 (I remember it well) and today, because your decision at the time to sell out must have been very stressful, and to see most markets fully rebound within 3 months must have hurt a lot.

I recall in the depths of paying off my debts because I refused to “go bankrupt”, I attended a dinner party of peers, and all the guests were complaining how much money they had lost in the most recent stock market crash. It must have been around 1983 or 1985. I remember thinking to myself “hey, I am glad I have nothing, I am the only guy in the room who is happy”. It is all relative.

I reconciled this in my own mind a long time ago by asking myself “how much is enough”? There is what we all think we would like to retire on, a stable income with no effort required to maintain it, and that is the pipe dream Western governments have sold us all since before my birth. So I made myself three targets for the remainder of my life. A minimum target, a standard target and a stretch target. The minimum is the equivalent of a state pension, and the stretch is ten times that value. Not rocket science. I have spent the last 30 years working towards the stretch. The minimum nobody can take away from me. The standard still has some work to do on it, and the stretch target is the reason I got into Crypto last year.

I hope these ramblings may be of some help to you, to calm down your confusion. Chill out, don’t worry, and remember that life’s a b*tch, and then you die. :cry:

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I think you absolutely need a break. Maybe even just 2 weeks of doing something completely different? Are you still actively trading/investing? That’s probably not helping. It sounds like you’re trying to compensate for the losses and that’s not a great way to trade when you feel like you already have to make up for something.

Amen.

Hey all! Thanks for your responses. I appreciate them. Maybe, I should pause for a while as I might be aggressive without thinking things through. I really hope I can rise up and this is all a set back.

Have you seen the market tonight? Good thing, no one did panic selling. But, its an opportunity to buy if you have the funds. Did you buy any stocks?

Covid anxiety has certainly affected a lot of my decisions, not just the financial ones. It’s exhausting.