Interesting you said that! I learned early on that you can’t time the market! When I first started learning, I got lured into buying small gold companies. I turned 1k into 10k eventually giving that and more back. Over the years, I listened to doom and gloomers and moved money into other investments like diversifying into low caps and internationals. Tried lots of market timing and some day trading.When I was a touring musician living in London ca. '83/'84, I sent most of my money back to the U.S. where, upon my dad's advice, it was all put into Wellington and stayed there for a few years. Of course at some point later I learned just enough to be dangerous (to myself) and started moving it in and out of different mutual funds on a whim and torpedoed any chance of my being truly wealthy in retirement. Lesson learned the hard way.
Retired now, these days most of my $ is in the Vanguard Target 2025 fund; maybe not as brilliant a wealth accumulator as Wellington, but I have the consolation of global diversification. I also have some Wellesley for income.
Sometime in the 90s. I started to notice my wife’s very aggressive growth fund that we never touched was doing much better than I could. Eventually, after much number crunching, I came to the conclusion that staying aggressive and waiting out downturns heavy in growth will always win out long run and here we are.
Just now that we are retired and depend 100% on our investments, well, I’m much more conservative now. My mix allows me enough confidence to never be down more than 1/3rd or 21% using cash reserves. When I was younger, loosing half ment nothing to me other than staying the course and buying more. Now, not so much! lol
It’s funny what happens when we get old!
John
Statistics: Posted by itnetpro — Thu Jan 02, 2025 2:29 pm