I'll take on the comments re the US stock market on Friday...

I'll take on the comments re the US stock market on Friday because they are just completely silly to say the least.

Here we go... a few charts to follow....



Note comments in chart. Also, no big down day on the DJI last Friday. New all time high reached in the last trading week of the year. According to the data expressed through the DJI it has been a pretty good year.



Comments re the NDX are similar to the the DJI. Annual returns, however, are significantly better due to the magnificent seven. NDX also reached a new ATH last Thursday (US time). I also would not call a 0.84% decrease last Friday a big down day from Thursday's ATH.




Finally, the SPX - note comments in chart. No big down day on Friday. While the SPX has had a good year, unlike the DJI and NDX, it did not manage to achieve a new ATH, which is mainly due to the 493 stocks that are outside the magnificent seven. It did, however, achieve a new 12 month high last Thursday, just 0.5% below the ATH. Not a bad achievement really considering 2022!

As a proxy for Li stock I will use the LIT ETF.



It has been a tough year for Li stocks this year generally. However, there are green shoots appearing and the consolidation phase that the LIT ETF shows highlights this. Once again there was a decrease in price on Friday. However, there is no major concerns from what I can see.

I did have a look at the Li stocks (US and others) that I track and, although there was a generalised decrease in price across the board on Friday I would not consider this to be a huge issue. The main reason I hold this is that last Friday (29th Dec) was the end of the financial year in the US and anyone who was sitting on a loss in their share portfolio, and who was interesting in realising those losses for tax purposes, would have been willing to offload their losing positions for tax harvesting purposes. Thus, there seems to have been greater pressure on the sell side rather than the buy side, which is evidenced in the market data for Friday.

Per my comments above, the overall outlook for the stock market is much better at this time than at this time last year.

@R22 should you have issues with the ups and downs on a daily basis within the share market I might suggest that you investigate the use of a good index fund or maybe interest bearing investments in banks. This is not financial advice rather something for you to consider.

IMO DYOR