Never not be afraid!

Henny Penny, also known as Chicken Little, was one of my favourite stories as a kid. I'm sure you're familiar with the rather anxious hen who thought the world was ending because an acorn landed on her head. The mantra from that story that the sky is falling, has now become a famous idiom, indicating a mistaken belief that disaster is upon us.

A more contemporary phrase with a similar meaning in our family is “Never not be afraid!”. We’ve borrowed that from the 2013 family movie “The Croods” by Dreamworks. Grug the father, voice-acted by Nicolas Cage, does a great job of playing the paranoid father, who, in trying to keep his family safe is convinced that everything is out to get them - It’s a beautiful movie worth watching! In our family, and particularly with one of my daughters who tends to get a bit anxious, Grug's family motto of "Never not be afraid" has become a private code phrase that, despite its negative surface meaning, to us, is a humorous way to defuse uncertainty. In our family, it can be translated as, “It’s going to be OK... this isn’t something to worry about”. Perhaps you need to watch the movie to understand.

I’ve read a couple of headlines lately that Grug would have have been proud of…

“Australian share prices plummet $45bn after Trump recession fears tank US market”...

and,

“Horror signal Donald Trump has ‘gone too far’ as markets crash”...

Go ahead and google them – you can read the articles if you’re looking for something entirely unproductive to do.

I’ve always been distrustful of the news, and that’s only getting worse because it’s hard to even tell which news is real, and those that are real are so heavily politicised that they seem redundant. But one thing is common among them all. They are not sharing news out of the goodness of their hearts. In the old language, they’re trying to sell newspapers. These days, they’re trying to make you anxious, so you click stuff and earn them advertising dollars.

So if we peel back the sensationalism, what has actually happened to the markets? Well, they haven’t plummeted. They’re back at the same level they were in August last year, where they dipped below the current price. But we only have to go back a few months earlier than that to where the current share prices that we have ‘plummeted’ to, were record highs we had never seen before. When you look at it that way, it's not really that exciting or sensational. The graph below probably does a better job, with the dotted line showing the current price of the ASX200.