Tailor your investing plan to match your goals, time frame and appetite for risk.
If you had stitched together a sound, well-conceived investment plan before the financial crisis hit, you stood a much better chance of staying invested through the bear market than if you had neglected to look ahead. Then again, as former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson once put it, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” Boy, did we get socked! A Bloomberg survey found that a year after the stock market bottomed, two-thirds of U.S. investors said that their portfolios hadn’t recovered at all. This implies that many people were out of stocks at the market’s bottom, likely because they had abandoned their plans at just the wrong time. Or maybe they bailed because they didn’t have a road map to begin with. (Or perhaps, after taking that knockout punch, they stopped paying attention.) Read More…