Discipline in down markets and prosper.com

The last five weeks have been quite a roller coaster!
I regularly track a large portion of my investments online.
I hit a high of $370,610.08 on May 9th.
I hit a low of $345,063.21 on June 13th.

Actually after May 9th the price kept dropping lower and lower and lower.
It was quite depressing.
The only reassurance was that everything else was also dropping and my positions were participating in an overall down cycle versus something specific to my positions themselves, which are very diversified.

On Wednesday of this week, the market finally realized it had squeezed so much price out of everything, bargains existed (especially overseas). My portfolio rebounded about $6k.

During the low I was wondering why I didn't listen to the dollar bears and put my holdings in gold and foreign denominated cash - I wonder how gold did? I have a friend who's out of the market except for two gold related mutual funds, he must be giggling right now.

Overall, during the drop my portfolio dropped $25,600. That's 8 months worth of savings, maybe 7. Ouch! With the recent uptick I'm back at $351,701.06 as of this Friday 6/16/2006, which is still a $19,000 drop.

I expect new cash will flow into the market and some of the declines will be reversed.

On Thursday I transfered another $500 into prosper to bring me to $1500 put into it. Although the investment is illiquid, at least the principal risk is theoretically (if I diversify well) smaller. We'll see.

My end of June financial summary will let you know if my positions recovered from the dip or decided to continue spelunking!

Have a wonderful weekend,
makingourway