Well, what a week that was..

Well, the past week has been rather interesting hasn’t it?

This time last week I was counting down the last working week until my holiday, due to start on Saturday. Today, I’m planning my one daily trip out to get exercise and actually see that other people actually exist!

Luckily, I live by the river so at least on my one trip out I get to be in nature and can easily physically distant.

Over the past week, we’ve even had a number of positive days on the stock market. In fact, on one day the Dow Jones Index (a US stock market index) had its biggest single daily increase since 1933.

So, what does this tell us?

It tells us the stock market goes up and down and we have no way of knowing what will happen from one day to the next. This fully shows why it’s impossible to time the market, and why I’m not suggesting any changes to your portfolio based on what’s happening.

I fully understand how unsettling it is when the value of your investments fall, so I’m not in any way trying to minimise what’s happening or disregard any discomfort you might be feeling. We’re human beings and have emotions and therefore its not at all surprising we worry when our investments drop in value.

In fact, in the same way I run a portfolio report for my clients in advance of our meetings, my assistant also runs mine regularly so I can review what’s happening. My initial thought when she sent mine to me was that there’d been an error, because I was shocked by how much it had fallen. Sadly, there was no error.

Over the next few days, I will update again about various past disasters in the stock market, and how long it took to sort. I’ve got no idea how long this will take. But the aim is to show that big falls have happened in the past, and the stock market has recovered.

I’ll be contacting my clients more often than normal over the next few weeks. The aim is to show that I’m here, I’m still working, and I’m monitoring what’s happening on a regular basis. Hopefully, this will provide comfort to all my clients. I have some free time to talk to some others too if you have quereis.

If you have queries, concerns or want to talk things through please email me at mary@wealthforwomen.biz. We can arrange to talk.

So, I’m here if you’ve got concerns and queries.

Mary Waring

Mary Waring is a Chartered Accountant, Chartered Financial Planner and Money Mindset Coach, helping women transform their relationship with money so that they can become free and powerful. She is also the bestselling author of "The Wealthy Woman: A Man is Not a Financial Plan."

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This is part of an evolving photo-project, which will probably continue throughout the summer of 2008, and perhaps beyond: a random collection of "interesting" people in a broad stretch of the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- between 72nd Street and 104th Street, especially along Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

I don't like to intrude on people's privacy, so I normally use a telephoto lens in order to photograph them while they're still 50-100 feet away from me; but that means I have to continue focusing my attention on the people and activities half a block away, rather than on what's right in front of me.

I've also learned that, in many cases, the opportunities for an interesting picture are very fleeting -- literally a matter of a couple of seconds, before the person(s) in question move on, turn away, or stop doing whatever was interesting. So I've learned to keep the camera switched on (which contradicts my traditional urge to conserve battery power), and not worry so much about zooming in for a perfectly-framed picture ... after all, once the digital image is uploaded to my computer, it's pretty trivial to crop out the parts unrelated to the main subject.

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Well, what a week that was..

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