Carbon County's retirement fund took a multimillion dollar hit when the markets went crazy last month.

On Thursday, Robert Crampsie, secretary to the retirement board and county controller, told the Carbon County Retirement Board that the retirement portfolio as of Jan. 31 was $67,871,750, approximately $2.3 million lower than the end of the year."We're all well aware with how the market performed in January, which wasn't very well," he said, but noted that recent activity has showed a slight turnaround."We are well positioned once the market turns around to do well," Crampsie said. "It's a matter of getting the market to perform and we're hoping that is going to happen. The last few days have been a little more positive. Hopefully it hit bottom and is starting to turn around."Two portfolio advisers were at the monthly meeting to provide comments on the overall performance of the portfolios they manage for the county retirement fund.Mark Gensheimer, president of CS McKee investment managers, spoke about the market as a whole and the underperformance of the portfolio because of the economic picture."It's been an interesting ride the last few months with the market," he said. "The past few months we've seen a tremendous amount of volatility in the markets."We think the economy is improving slowly but surely," Gensheimer continued, saying that if you look at where the country is today versus where it was a few years ago, it has a lower unemployment rate and stronger consumer spending trend. "All-in-all, we're pretty positive."John Thompson, senior vice president of Emerald Advisers Inc., echoed Gensheimer's thoughts about the market volatility and projected his interpretation of the year ahead based on current activity."We had a tough fourth quarter ... but for the year, we were fortunate to outperform our benchmarks modestly," he said."We think that it is not unreasonable to expect moderate economic growth in 2016. A lot of it could be driven by extra money consumers have in their pockets."