The image of a sine wave with its peak and trough can be a useful way to visualize the glory and agony of participating in financial markets. Let's go through this sine wave journey together.

Cash and other more stable investments are suitable for fulfilling short-term income needs. However, it's unlikely that these will keep pace with inflation over the long term.

The goal of quantitative tightening (QT) is to help reduce inflation. At this time, inflation is at a multi-decade high, with headline inflation just over 8%. The Fed is attempting to apply QT without slowing economic activity too much.

Price movements and recession periods don't always follow the yellow parallel lines of a no-pass zone. Instead, they are part of a dynamic business cycle that can impact financial markets in a variety of ways.

When inflation is high, consumer sentiment tends to be low. This makes intuitive sense; as we're shopping and seeing higher prices, our dollars are not going as far as they used to. This is not the first time we have seen this setup with sentiment low and inflation high.

Larger daily price movements that negatively impact investors on the way down tend to be close neighbors to those price movements that benefit investors on the way up.

Why does it seem like the market goes down faster than it goes up? We dive into the notion that stock market movements seem to take the escalator up and the elevator going down.