And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
The Global Financial Crisis was the second significant market event I was conscious of. My investing journey began at the same time as the 2000 ‘Dot com’ bubble. I have few distinct memories of that latter event, though I do recall a work supervisor who had a sizeable investment in an actively managed global technology focused fund, ruefully reflecting on market events.
The Global Financial Crisis was different – it emerged in the early phases of my investment journey, around seven years after I started building an investment portfolio by making regular contributions, and after I had already read a number of investment books and researched some financial market history. Indeed, By mid-2006 I had already set an early FI goal of achieving investment returns equal to average expenditure, with an ambitious deadline of December 2008. This shows how far I was from anticipating the shape of events to come.
This post results from reader questions received about my direct experience with the Global Financial Crisis. It focuses on the period of the crisis and initial recovery, from 2007 through the 2010 and aims to cover:
- what investments were made leading up to and through the crisis period
- the overall asset allocation of the portfolio through the period
- the impact of the crisis of the portfolio – including overall portfolio value and distributions; and
- how the experience of the Global Financial Crisis has shaped the rest of the financial independence journey
In short, how – or indeed was – this storm weathered?
Answering that question needs to start at the beginning, however, with a description of the context in which the crisis developed.
Continue reading “Weathering the Storm – Investing through the Global Financial Crisis”
This is the fastest growth in the past half year. It is also the second largest absolute increase in over three years of measurement.