My retirement fund that I just started was worth $15k in December of 2021. Then, May of 2022, our area was hit really hard. My retirement plan went down to $7k. Today, it’s worth $11k. I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.
What most of the commenters are missing is that the assumption that one has to know how to gamble in order to have a retirement is a broken and stupid USA thing. Nobody should be forced to learn these things in order to not end up on the street. OP clearly has no idea what they are doing-- and so many comments point this out with varying degrees of rudeness, smugness, and shitty attitude-- but the point should be that we are feeding naive investors like these to the lions and that is morally wrong and collectively shortsighted. We all suffer as a society because people like this are being required to make investment decisions and doing that really poorly.
He didn’t have to know, and he himself knew of the alternatives for people who don’t “know how to gamble”. Nobody in any country can stop you from using your own money in an unwise manner.