Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
The bad news for investors continues to mount as stocks on Wall Street and the TSX keep tumbling.
Two weeks ago, the S&P/TSX composite index entered correction territory and the S&P 500 plunged into a bear market. On Thursday, the S&P/TSX fell another 300 points while the S&P 500 posted its worst first-half result in 52 years.
But while it can be easy for your emotions to take over if you've got money invested in the market, experts agree that there's no need to panic if you're invested in the right type of portfolio with the right level of risk.
"The sage advice -- I can't remember who said it -- is that your investments are like a bar of soap. The more you touch them, the smaller they get," author and personal finance educator Kelley Keehn told CTVNews.ca over the phone on Thursday.
If the state of the markets has you feeling especially anxious, it may be a sign that you weren't in the right risk bracket in the first place.
"If you can't sleep at night, maybe you weren't in the proper portfolio and this really is the time to talk to your investment advisor," Keehn explained.
If this applies to you, it may be necessary to de-risk your portfolio by reallocating some of your investments in stocks and equities into bonds, GICs or savings accounts.
"A lot of people think they can take on more risk than they actually can and that's been very evident now with the crypto crash," said personal finance expert and CTVNews.ca contributor Christopher Liew in a phone interview on Thursday. "People were investing in crypto, which generally is extremely highly volatile and risky. But when things are going up, people don't really care. But now that it's crashed, a lot of people that couldn't handle that risk are now really feeling that pressure."
Your risk tolerance could also shift based on changes in your life. If you're planning on retiring or buying a house soon, for example, that could warrant shifting your portfolio to one that is more low-risk.
"If nothing has changed, if it's just that the markets are going bananas, then you should just leave it alone. But if something significant has changed … that really changes what you're doing now. It doesn't mean that you drastically slam on the brakes on the highway and start selling. These things should have some forethought," said Keehn.
It can be disheartening to see the value of your portfolio appearing to be in freefall and experts advise that it's not a good idea to be checking your portfolio every day.
"If you're invested in what you should be invested in, then yeah, you shouldn't be looking at it," Keehn said.
While shorter term investors may need to check their portfolios more frequently, Liew says longer term investors should only be checking their money every few months, or if they're planning on making any new contributions.
"I would say check it as less often as you can, because if you don't need the money for 10, 20 or even 30 years, it doesn't make sense to check it daily," he said.
Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, says that constantly checking your portfolio could worsen your mental health and cause you to make rash decisions.
"You're getting information that you want, but you can overdo it." he told CTVNews.ca over the phone on Wednesday. "Every moment you spend looking at that is going to feed your brain and put it into that stressful state."
While the recent market downturn may feel painful, Keehn says that in the long run, this is simply a "blip." While the S&P/TSX Composite Index is down nearly 13 per cent since the start of April, it has still increased an average of 4.63 per cent annually over the last five years and 5.10 per cent over the last 10 years.
Joordens says economic downturns can be quite stress-inducing and it can be easy to make emotional knee-jerk reactions.
"When we see the downturns start to happen, that becomes a big problem for us because it becomes a threat. And we have a very natural and primitive response to threat," he said.
While our brain's frontal lobes are in charge of rational decision making, the brain's limbic system activates the primitive "flight or fight" response when we're faced with a threat.
"Quite often that works out well for us. If a bear steps in front of us that's what we want to happen. We want our primitive limbic survival system to take control and get us through this," Joordens explained.
But while our limbic systems works well when it comes to responding to something like a bear, it's not well-suited to respond to a bear market.
"Where you have weird threats, like a crashing stock market, the limbic system still does what it always has done. It hasn't changed and it wants you to fight or flee. And that's what makes it so damn uncomfortable," said Joordens.
If the markets have you feeling anxious, Joordens recommends finding "cognitive palate cleansers" in things that make you laugh and smile, such as your favourite TV show.
"Try to change the channel on your mind and the way you can do that is through what you experience in the world," he said. "The idea here is you've removed the taste of that negative stressor from your mind, rather than watching it and then walking away and carrying it with you in your mind."
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.