esrosedotblog

STAYING THE COURSE

I stayed with my stock portfolio. Or, to put it another way, I stayed in the market. I didn't run.

Now, I feel vindicated.

Patience, Please, With That Investment Plan

Actually it wasn't much of a decision to stay with the market. I had no place to go.

I cannot understand anyone's going to cash. Or bonds. My financial constitution cannot digest interest rates that low.

And I believe that what goes down must come up. It is nature's way. Cycles.

I didn't know how fast it would happen but I knew it would happen.

In the early days, I believed in TARP and other federal steps to assuage the panic.

When Obama came in, I was politically committed to believe that his actions were the right ones to take.

If these Bush/Obama actions were meant to maintain confidence, it worked with me.

All this added up to staying with what I had.

And now, I have more than half of it back.

For two years or less, I took out expensive dollars from my IRA. The values had dropped so I was taking out dollars that were close to or less than the dollars I had put in many years ago. That is as good as cash or bonds. At least the bonds that let you take money out and cash them in early without penalty.

But, as it turned out, I was only using these "deflated" dollars for a short time.

A lot of this is also luck. Luck that I have financial coaches who said to stay. Luck that I am too lazy to think too much about the market and over analyze it. Luck that I have the kind of managed fund, not a mutual fund, that I think optimizes return although I don't like paying the fees every quarter. They are relatively small compared to the kind of money we are talking about.

I am also most lucky in being in a market that believes in the future and has rebounded faster than anyone thought it would at any time before it rebounded.

It could, of course, go all to shit in a short time. But so can I.

Labels: finance