Dana Blankenhorn

Cash is Still King

You don’t have a loss until you sell.

I am reminded of that during the current tech wreck.

I have a retirement account, which for a while was worth over $1 million. It’s worth just two-thirds of that now.

But that’s OK. Because the account includes about $140,000 in cash. I can buy some stocks. I don’t have to sell any. I can wait out the bear market.

The stocks I own are all in real companies, most of them profitable. I have some dogs that may not come back, like Cloudflare and Upstart. But Amazon will rise again. So will Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Bitcoin won’t come back (I hope), nor the rest of the cryptotrash. There’s still almost $1.22 trillion locked in that garbage. There are losses still to come.

American Bear, Global Crash

I’m not a millionaire right now.

My retirement account is down 25%. I was heavily into tech stocks like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. They’re all down. My more speculative investments, companies like Fubo and Cloudflare, are worth less every day.

But I’m lucky. If you’re an American, you’re lucky too. Because what’s really happening is a global market crash.

The best investment for an investor in China, in Europe or in the global south today is the American dollar. Government bonds at 3% look good because the value of the dollar itself is rising.