Invest in Yourself This Year

Every new year brings the same inexplicable levels of optimism. The flipping of the calendar suggests that everything will just start over, except this time it will be good. The diet will work, the 6 a.m. morning routine will finally feel good, the pile of books on your nightstand will be read in a matter of weeks even though they’ve been sitting there for three consecutive new years. It will suddenly all come together, mystically and magically, because it’s a different year and for about three or four days it’s all happening.

This same optimism was applied this year to the stock market by the smarty pants who understand money: 2021 was supposed to herald an economic boom, or at least a re-stabilization, with the help of covid vaccines, stimulus checks, and the general assumption that more people would be returning to work and spending their earnings on fun shit instead of boring old groceries and toilet paper.

But it looks like the stock exchange did not get the this-is-my-year memo and has kicked off 2021 with a swift slap to the face of everyone’s arrows. According to Politico, all the arrows were down significantly: “The S&P 500 was 1% lower in morning trading,” as well as the Dow Jones which “was down 390 points,” with the Nasdaq composite suffering the least with a 0.7 percent decline before 11 a.m. Eastern—potentially in a response to surging cases of covid. The same decline was seen with Japanese stocks “as officials there mull a state of emergency.”

Happy fucking new year, right?

But if catchy Instagram slogans have taught us anything, it’s that pain and monetary declines are temporary (for the most part). While the optimism of a new year leading to a financial upswing is extremely misplaced, it seems my professional pessimistic outlook cultivated by my months of being a fake stock analyst with absolutely no schooling or formal training in the subject, has served me better than the finance bros who actually had hope. Can you imagine? Hope? In this economy!

While hope is about as dead as my shares of Delta, there are still some companies that will see a 2021 hope fueled rebound because capitalism only works if there are winners and losers. So which arrows will come out literally and figuratively on top by the end of this year? I do not know because as I am legally bound to say several times a week, I’m not a real expert, I’m just fucking around on the trading floor and self-teaching.

Keeping that in mind, barring any new and exciting IPOs dropping in December, the winners will be the usual suspects that win every fucking year, and which have already profited wildly in the pandemic. Amazon, Alphabet (a.k.a. Google, whose employees just formed a new union), maybe Apple—but probably not because they go up and down like strippers booties go—and the streaming services scooping up all the film releases. Big pharma companies involved in vaccine creation and distribution should also see a bump but based on the rollercoaster ride I went on with Moderna throughout the entire 2020 will they/won’t they make a vaccine debacle, I don’t reckon a climb will sustain itself for an entire year.

So which of these potential long-term winners should you invest in? That’s a trick question. Invest in yourself this year and that stack of books you are never going to get to if you keep spending time trying to decipher the black magic of the stock market. But also maybe listen to this guy and don’t invest in DoorDash, even though they had a little surge.