A Wild Ride | Weekly Roundup - February 10, 2018

Talk about a sharp change in the direction of the markets.  This past week was truly a wild ride with the DJIA having 2 1,000+ point declines with the worst coming on Monday where the DJIA was down over 1,500 points at the lows.  The financial media and various talking heads were quick to jump on the declines to get that precious screen time all with their own opinions on why the markets suddenly changed directions.  The answer is that there were a lot more sellers in the market than buyers: simple as that.  As for the reason no one will ever know.

Monday was quite frustrating for me because there were some adjustments to some of my options positions that I wanted to make.  That would have been fine....except....my broker's site, Fidelity, was down for about the first 1-2 hours of trading.  Even when I could log in I couldn't even get to a trade page or even my positions pages before I would be logged out.  Needless to say I was pretty pissed.

Even worse is that the response from Fidelity was less than satisfying.  The cynic in me thinks there were nefarious reasons for the site crashing along with the markets, of course I'm also reading Flash Boys right now which doesn't exactly paint Wall Street in a good light.  Although the optimist in me believes that it truly was an overload of their system and a tech glitch.  Unfortunately neither one of those causes is good because it either means that Fidelity purposefully screwed investors, not likely, or their IT department is sorely lacking and proving incompetent.  I'll be making some serious considerations about moving so of my accounts/capital to another brokerage firm to at least spread out the risk of not being able to access my accounts in the event this happens again.

Did anyone else's brokerage experience outages during the market craziness this week?

Despite all of the market turmoil I have to say that I'm pretty happy with how I handled my emotions during the thick of it.  Honestly if anything the only emotion I felt was disappointment.  Not because of the declines, but because of the declines and me with no cash to buy anything.  

On a different subject SpaceX launched a Tesla into space during their test of the Falcon Heavy Launch.  It's really amazing seeing those rockets take off...return to Earth...and land on a platform...right side up.  WTF!?!?  Absolutely mind blowing.  

On to the Roundup

In case you missed them, here's the posts from Passive-Income-Pursuit over the past week.

• One Raise At A Time | 23 YUM
• One Raise At A Time | The Raises Just Keep Coming
• Dividend Update - January 2018

Also, be sure to sign up to receive posts via email and to follow me on Twitter@JC_PIP so you don't miss anything.  You can also follow me on Facebook or Pinterest if you prefer those methods to get your daily fix and keep up to date on happenings around here.

Once again I'd like to say thanks to each and every one of you that read, commented, and shared posts from here this past week.  This dividend growth investing and financial independence community is amazing and the openness from everyone is awesome.  Thanks again!

Now on to the links!

Should Dividend Investors Worry About Rising Interest Rates? by Dividend Growth Investor

Contingency Plans For A Digital Bank Run by Financial Samurai

Passive Income Update - January 2018 by Roadmap2Retire

Protect Your Early Retirement From Sequence Of Returns Risk by Out Next Life

February 2018 Stock Considerations by DivHut

My Only Regret In Life: Speed To A Million by Dividends Diversify

Annual Review 2017 by DivGro

Lanny's February Dividend Stock Watchlist by Dividend Diplomats

10 Lessons I Learned From 4 Months of Unemployment by Retire Before Dad

10 Things I'll Buy When I'm Rich by Retire By 40

The Drawbacks of Behavioral Finance During Market Corrections by A Wealth of Common Sense

Ooops, We Live Blogged The Flash Crash. Kind Of. by Planting Our Pennies

The Cash Flow Index To Financial Independence by Divnomics

Business Lessons From Reed Hasting - Part 1 by 25iq

If you're looking for investment ideas, A Frugal Family's Journey maintains a list of stock analyses and recent buys from fellow bloggers.

I hope you all have a great weekend!