There’s a special kind of discomfort that comes with opening your brokerage app and seeing a sea of red. Not the dramatic, panic-inducing kind of red. The slow, unsettling kind – where one situation after another is quietly bleeding, and you know, deep down, that a lot of it is self-inflicted.
This is roughly where I find myself with my Interactive Brokers (IBKR) portfolio on a Saturday morning.
Headline: Bad YTD decline, but improvement
sitting on the portfolio -8.66% year-on-year By the end of April 2026. It sounds inconvenient, and it certainly is… but context matters.
At its worst (around early to mid-April), the portfolio was almost bankrupt -22%. The recovery since then has been worthwhile (very grateful). The chart now looks like a distorted Nike Swoosh tilted at an unfortunate angle
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