No, not about Stranger Things.  Sorry for the false advertising.  What I want to talk about is why you should be happy about drops in the stock market.  I know, stick with me here.  Just a short time ago the stock market experienced a sharp downturn, and many people “lost” tons of money (I’ll have another post on this fallacy).  People are understandably sad when their portfolio loses value, I don’t like to see those numbers go down either, but we shouldn’t be.  Let’s think about the alternative.  Stocks always go up.  Everyday.  Nearly guaranteed.  No need to worry, right?  Great!  But remember my discussion on the investment “flea market”.  If stocks had a near guarantee of going up every day, they wouldn’t need to pay you nearly the same return.  People (correctly) are willing to take less money on their investments in exchange for lower probability that they will decrease in value.  This is why stocks have a greater return than corporate bonds, which have a greater return than US Gov bonds, which have a greater return than CD’s.  Return follows risk in an open market.  So if stocks went up every day without a worry, they’d yield much less!  That’s bad!  We already have lower-yielding safer investments available to us, the beauty of stocks is for those of us with long time horizons to invest, they offer a great return in exchange for riding those ups and downs.  The downs are not an unfortunate part of investing in stocks, they’re necessary.  And, if that day, week, month or even year downturn hurts you financially because you were planning on selling right away, you shouldn’t be in stocks in the first place.  So, go ahead and cheer those hits to your portfolio.  Maybe privately so everyone else doesn’t think you’re crazy.