38.04% in 2013

The numbers are in and Michele's and my accounts returned 38.04% net of all expenses last year.  Not bad.  Total return on the S&P 500 was 32.39, so I beat the market.

Which is considered to be a good thing, or so I've heard.  But why?  Why do news anchors and countless Ivy League educated professionals obsess over what the market does?  Everybody agrees.  Market's up, it's a good year.  Market's down and we're all depressed.  That's when we run for the back of the cave because the market says so.

Don't get me wrong.  I think the stock market is one of the most amazing inventions in the history of mankind, as important as the wheel.  A minute-by-minute voting mechanism where anybody in any country (with any money) has a say about their best guess for the future - that's a powerful tool. Because we all know something.  Everybody has a piece of the highly complex puzzle that is the 21st century.  The financial indexes quantify all our hopes and dreams and fears, the wars, everything we know, the dirty little secrets our governments think they can hide, our inventions and scientific advances, every mistake, bluff and blunder we make on this planet.  It's all there somewhere, condensed into a single, simple number.  I love the language of stocks.  So messy yet so precise.

But. . . but. . .

If you are a professional paid to manage other people's money, then you have to worry about beating the S&P 500.  But to normal folks like you and me, what does it really matter?  The market isn't right or wrong. It's just a bunch of human beings voting.  At it's best it's a tool to make our own decisions about what we think and invest our hard-earned dollars accordingly. 

But beating the market will never be as important as a good night's sleep.  Or a friend we can call when everything's gone wrong.  It's not a walk in the woods or a good book or the time to enjoy those things.  And it's definitely not our health.  Beating the S&P 500 is not a goal.  It's just a number on a page and I'm never going to use it to measure my life.