2023 was great but it's time to stay prudent

It’s important to set up your portfolio so you can tolerate periodic bouts of market agony

- Jeff Sommer

It was a great year for the stock market and for the vast majority of investors in workplace retirement accounts. But let's not get carried away.

Even after the 2023 gains, most stock investors are only barely above water since the start of 2022.

It looks better when you include dividends. Then, the S&P 500 returned 3.42 per cent over the course of the two calendar years.

Even so, the paltry stock market rises haven't kept up with inflation.

If you can stand the pain, recall the simultaneous declines in the stock and bond markets that made 2022 a terrible year for investors. It was arguably even worse than 2008, when the stock market collapsed during the great financial crisis. In 2022, bonds declined sharply in value as interest rates rose, while during the financial crisis, investment-grade bonds rallied as interest rates declined.

Lately, the markets have been much kinder to investors, with both stocks and bonds holding their own.

The good returns for 2023 are, thanks in no small part to the brilliant performance of the last three months of the year, fuelled by growing expectations that the United States economy will avoid a recession, and that the Federal Reserve will soon begin to cut shortterm interest rates.

The final quarterly and annual numbers for 2023 were exceptionally good. They translate into substantial annual gains for millions of investors who hold stocks and bonds indirectly, through mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and trusts, often in workplace retirement accounts.

So if you have held broadly diversified investments that track the markets, endured the bad times of 2022 and persevered through 2023, you are probably doing okay.

You may even be slightly ahead of where your portfolio stood at the start of 2022.