I'm ready to move my $ out of the stock market. Can you help me pick a fund?

[disneysteve]

It's really easy to look back and identify those low and high points; it's not as easy to identify them when looking ahead.

It's literally impossible. That's why market timing doesn't work. I mean, sure you may get lucky and sell right before a crash but you need to get lucky twice, once on the sale and again on the repurchase. The odds against that happening are phenomenally low. Now, the crash has already occurred, so selling at this point makes no sense. You'd just be locking in losses. At this stage, it makes a lot more sense to start looking for buying opportunities to take advantage of the lower prices so that you can take greater advantage of the eventual recovery.

Personally, I'm not buying back in yet because our allocation hasn't moved far enough from my target, but once it does, I will feed money back in to rebalance.

[Atretes1]

MY 457 is down 2.44% YTD. I'm going to keep trucking along.

75.92% Vanguard 500 Index Admiral
16.56 % Vanguard Total Intl Stock Index Admiral
7.52 % Vanguard Small Cap Index Adm

[Tabs]

I've already bought more into this dip.

[myrdale]

Personally, for my Roth IRA I put $2k in Feb 1st, another $3k in on March 1st. I hope to top it off come April 1st. The market may go up or down, trying to hold off until the lowest point of the year is hard to do so long as my crystal ball remains broken.

[ua_guy]

I won't say my heart didn't skip a few beats last night while I thought about my wholesale sell-off yesterday.

I'm reminded that while the directional vectors of the market are normal, all external factors are definitely not, including the deep-down feeling that things are "wrong" and the markets, economy, and overall future are headed in a truly bad direction. Old rules of investing may not apply right now. Deep down I believe I made the right step to preserve capital in "unprecedented" times.

Next steps will be moving that money into something boring. I still have maximum retirement contributions enabled via my paychecks. I will consider that pure gambling going forward and will continue to buy slices of foreign and domestic stock so I can increase my exposure to any good forces along the way. I also plan to contribute my maximum $7k to my IRA this year, although it will likely be a boring investment. If the future ahead brings calmer weather, I will move my "old world" capital back into riskier assets.

[QuarterMillionMan]

You got to do what you got to do and follow your intuition. I will keep buying. Here we go 2008 all over again (I've been waiting for it). I just bought $1000 worth of bitcoin at $80,500.

[disneysteve]

Personally, for my Roth IRA I put $2k in Feb 1st, another $3k in on March 1st. I hope to top it off come April 1st. The market may go up or down, trying to hold off until the lowest point of the year is hard to do so long as my crystal ball remains broken.

Yep, just keep feeding in the money. As long as your time horizon is years and not weeks for when you'll need that money, you'll be fine.

[james.hendrickson]

All - pulsed my smart money friends on this topic.

You could always buy gold or short term treasuries if you need a place to stash your cash that not going to lose money.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Tomorrow I predict Dow plunges 2000 points, ua_guy I believe made the correct move. Tomorrow I'll buy another $1000 in bitcoin if it doesn't rocket to the moom.

[james.hendrickson]

Tomorrow I predict Dow plunges 2000 points, ua_guy I believe made the correct move. Tomorrow I'll buy another $1000 in bitcoin if it doesn't rocket to the moom.

Buy gold and treasuries.

[ua_guy]

Tomorrow I predict Dow plunges 2000 points, ua_guy I believe made the correct move. Tomorrow I'll buy another $1000 in bitcoin if it doesn't rocket to the moom.

3%, 5%, 19% market loss, who knows tomorrow. Or, the day could end in the green. This is what I'm so sick and tired of. We can't even go a day lately without some manufactured crisis that send the market this way or that. Not normal.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Gold is hard to store and move around. Treasuries I don't trust big government. Bitcoin is easy to store and move, if needed. I wanted to get another safe deposit box at Chase where I have a small box but Chase is no longer renting new boxes.

[Snydley]

Oh, I wasn't suggesting Treasuries instead of CDs. I was suggesting them instead of bond funds. I'm totally fine with CDs. We own a bunch of CDs. We own a bunch of Treasuries. Whenever I'm making a purchase because something has matured, I look at both for the duration that I want and pick the best deal.

Are the bond funds not safe?? Ugh. How to I buy a CD instead of a bond fund in my Fidelity/Vanguard accounts?

I'm 50. My DH is 56. We just paid off our house. We own 3 properties now (total net worth ~1.3mil), and we have 200K put away for DDs college (she starts in Sept.) I think we have about 1 million in retirement accounts and we didn't start saving for retirement until ~2011. The market made big gains for us in that time.

RE: corporate greed, I feel like a frog that has been sitting in water that kept having the heat slowly turned up and I have to jump out now. I cannot invest my earnings in Tesla, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, etc anymore. These companies are too big and stealing from customers and their employees. I want to also move my banking to a credit union, and use cash and not credit cards as much as possible. I'm just done.

[kork13]

Are the bond funds not safe?? Ugh. How to I buy a CD instead of a bond fund in my Fidelity/Vanguard accounts?

I'm 50. My DH is 56. We just paid off our house. We own 3 properties now (total net worth ~1.3mil), and we have 200K put away for DDs college (she starts in Sept.) I think we have about 1 million in retirement accounts and we didn't start saving for retirement until ~2011. The market made big gains for us in that time.

RE: corporate greed, I feel like a frog that has been sitting in water that kept having the heat slowly turned up and I have to jump out now. I cannot invest my earnings in Tesla, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, etc anymore. These companies are too big and stealing from customers and their employees. I want to also move my banking to a credit union, and use cash and not credit cards as much as possible. I'm just done.

Thanks for explaining your situation more. Are you guys planning on retiring soon? Already retired? The problem with pulling everything out of the market & going into nothing but fixed income is that you won't be able to keep up with inflation, especially after taxes. If your CDs/Treasuries/whatever are earning 3-4%, with inflation running at ~3%, taxes will eat your earnings down to being at or below the inflation rate. It sets a hard cap on your spending power, without the ability to grow ... and if/when you withdraw from it, that cap continues to decrease. Typically (though not in all locations), real estate assets tend to also grow roughly in line with inflation. So they, again, will not provide enough growth to allow for you to reliably draw from your assets in retirement (beyond a very definite timeline).

You need some higher-earning assets to keep your assets growing -- stock market investments are the simplest way to bump up your earnings. Yes, during some periods it'll hurt ... but a reasonable fixed-income component will balance that out & keep things stable enough for you to remain patient.

I totally understand that watching the chaos going on right now is troubling. But panic-selling is never going to help.

[Atretes1]

One other thing - I think the market could completely crash out in a way that has never been seen before. We have never had such a corrupt, mentally ill president as we do now, and his behavior is totally off the rails. Musk is another complete mental case. Throw in a congress full of 95%+ wimps, and we should expect some really unprecedented events in the coming months and the market is not going to respond well (my guess).

The world didn't end his 1st term.