The end of the world as we know it ?

Well, the stock markets around the world have certainly suffered a rout this week.

Last Friday, 21 February, the FTSE100 closed at 7,404.  It closed today at 6,581 representing a one-week fall of 11.1% and now dipping into 'correction' territory. 

run away, run away !!

Today's the last working day of the month, so as usual I've updated my combined portfolio spreadsheets and the summary doesn't make very pleasant reading.   And until Monday of this week, February had seemed quite a decent month !

My portfolio return for February was -4.1%, and is -5.0% since the beginning of the year.  It's holding up better than the FTSE100 but is still well down in absolute cash terms (this -4.1% is the biggest monthly fall I've encountered in the seven years since I started tracking everything properly - the previous worst month had been -4.0% in August 2015).

But isn't this slump in the equity markets exactly what we've all been waiting for, at least those of us still in the accumulation phase ? 

So, how best to capitalise on what could either be a time-limited buying opportunity or a razor-sharp falling knife ? 

Hard Landscaping in the Front Bed - Six on Saturday

Back in 2017, our neighbours gave us the outer ring sector stones from a brand new 2.7 metre (9') diameter paving circle - they'd only laid the two inner rings themselves in their back garden.  

I spotted the pieces being loaded into the boot of their car and asked what they intended to do with them, and they were actually going to take them to the tip !   These are cut from stone, not mould-formed in concrete, so I bet the full circle kit was very expensive and, of course, it being the outer ring they were discarding, they were throwing away around three-quarters of the weight of all the stone they'd paid for ...

Anyway, we managed to rescue them, and for the last couple of years these 24 sectors have formed a winding path across the length of the side bed (see also the satellite image on our garden layout post).

As with almost all our paving, the stones were simply laid loose onto levelled and compacted soil - no hardcore foundations or mortar bed fixings - because it's not the first time we've decided to relocate sections of paving.

the long and winding road, to the left...

And last week, we decided to move all these paving stones to the front bed and reconfigure them to their intended purpose, i.e. as a ring.