Planning Briefs

As the first three months of 2022 come to an end, the stock market is on the way to its first quarterly loss since the first quarter of 2020, when the Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost -19.6% of its value. To be clear, stocks returned profits in seven straight quarters following the first quarter of 2020, when the pandemic struck. This table shows how often a losing quarter has occurred since 2015. Past performance never is a guarantee of future results, and there is a risk the pattern of intermittent losses shown here will not be repeated. That risk is...