Starting after this month, you are going to see more of your year-over-year performance reports show gains, rather than losses. The strength in the market since March has finally overcome some of the weakness last fall. Once we are past the collapse last October, we will be ahead for the past year. Funny how that works, just like the rant last week on why the ‘lost decade’ tells us more about where it started than where it ends, the past year tells us more about last fall than this year. The decline in September last year was -8.9%. October fell -16.8%. November was a further -7.2%. We’ll have just gotten rid of that first bit in the short-term history when this month is over. After December’s gain of 1%, January fell by -8.4% and February dropped -10.7%. Add in the first 9 days of March and that put us down over 25% year-to-date from December 31st. Most of the whole big stock rally since then has only just recently gotten that 25% drop back and a little bit more. (Remember that you need to gain one-third to overcome a drop of one-quarter, up a half to get back a third, up 100% to get back a half.) Read more