If you’ve been paying any attention at all to financial news this week, you’ve probably heard about the large 19% drop that Facebook experienced on Thursday.  Facebook is the fourth largest company in the US by market cap — behind only Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon — and the total loss amounts to a staggering $120 billion wiped out.  That’s easily the largest single day loss by one company in recent stock market history, and if you’re personally holding a lot of Facebook stock you’re probably not a happy camper.

But let’s say you’re more the index investor type than the individual stock picker.  Should you be worried?

With the stock market recently dropping more than 10% in a short amount of time, I’ve noticed a lot of panic in financial circles.  Beyond the fairly steep short-term loss there’s also the fear that a much more painful long-term correction may finally be starting, and stock market investors are understandably on edge.

Do you worry that your life savings are about to catch fire and burn to the ground?  Setting aside what is causing the drop, whether it portends a major correction, or even whether you should be all that concerned about it in the long run, I’d like to focus for a moment on your very real anxiety and what you can absolutely do about it.

I’m personally not worried in the slightest, and it’s not because I’m some sort of investing robot who never gets upset.  It’s because I would not have known that there’s such a major stock correction from looking at my own account balances, as a panic-inducing drop just isn’t there.  While comparing relative portfolio performances over just a few weeks is pretty pointless, in this case it’s definitely not a matter of luck but of very deliberate structural portfolio planning.  When I invested my money, I took the time to build firewalls.  

Investors have a real knack for over-thinking things.  There are those who imagine themselves as master traders controlling hundreds of variables at once like rocket scientists or professional sound mixers and squeezing out every last decimal of performance.  And of course there are inexperienced types who also imagine investing works like that but who lack the confidence to even start learning.  Personally I believe this complexity myth is disruptive to the well-being of both sets of people, and nowhere do I see this more than in the simplest of investing topics — cash.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the tag line for Portfolio Charts:

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Calculations

While obviously a play on words to a common phrase that figuratively captures the descriptive power of images, some may not be aware that in the context of the site it is actually quite literal.  Lots and lots of calculations go into every image, and I thought it might be fun to illustrate just how deep the rabbit hole goes.