Should I sell all my investments before Trump stuns the nation...
With the stupidest, craziest, most incomprehensible address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow?
= new reply since forum marked as read
You must be Russian?
Trump he goodnik. 
Except in the Admiral version, VFIAX (lower expenses)... It's done well, as have some other VG funds.
But I well remember how my investments lost big bucks back in 2000, and, later, in 2008. My retirement will probably come early next year.
If not sooner. Depends on how much longer I can put up with the BS at work
why is the market so high right now?
I suspect that FOP have been investing to prop up the puppet and make him look better than is real. Aside from the bragging rights, it also puts a "for sale" sign on lots of assets that will become problematic as international interests when the crash comes... all in the name of "it's the economy , stupid." Too many clueless Amerkins only think that high market value is all it takes for the country to be okay.
Generally good advice, however, I remember watching my balanced investments hit the toilet in 2000 and 2007 while I stood by calmly and unemotionally.
Sometimes a hunch or intuition pays off... especially if it comes on the heels of long term observation/appraisal.
Equities tend to climb slowly, and plunge quickly. Ever noticed that?
But nobody has a fool proof formula for investing success. Well, if they do, they aren't sharing it, because then it would be self-defeating.
What's that they say? You can't really beat the indexes. But you can loose the farm when the indexes crash.
Speaking of which, I read recently that 1%'rs and agribusiness is busy buying up small farms across the nation, turning them into factory farms. Or maybe trying to build new towns and cities, ala the failed Chinese gambit.
But even Scarlett O'Hara knew that, "The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts".
Except in the case of landslides, earthquakes, floods, direct asteroid hits, and nuclear Armageddon.
(and selling too, since I didn't have much "new money"
[font color = blue]>>I can count on one finger the number of my clients that were burning up my phone after March of '09 (when the market bottomed and started back up) with buy orders.<<[/font]
I had inherited a lot of stuff in late '05, and along with my own stuff I had accounts at about 6 different brokerages at least. It was in the '08 and '09 period when I got around to consolidating and simplifying all that -- selling what I didn't want and using the proceeds to buy, yes, gasp, equities (equity mutual funds).
The nice thing with the selling of what I sold at the bottom is that I had lovely capital losses (for tax purposes) that I'm still using up ($3,000 / year offset my regular income, plus offsetting the inevitable forced capital gains distributions). So it was a lovely lovely time to do the consolidation / simplification / cleaning (while still maintaining my overall equity allocation by buying replacement equities).
I even set up margin accounts at the 3 financial institutions I retained, and was thinking of buying equities via margin loans in the '08 - '09 period, but the margin loan disclosure stuff was so scary that I didn't. Drat drat drat. But at least, on net, I hung on to my equity allocation at a very scary time.
[font color = blue]>>TimING the market is not nearly as important as time IN the market. <<[/font]
Timing would be a fabulous tool, but I don't know anybody who has done it consistently well (aside claims in investment newsletters which I ignore, where they are all sterling geniuses). The vast majority of investors -- as shown by studies by Dalbar and others -- get it backwards -- selling after say a 20%-30% drop, and not buying again until the market has recovered and gone way above its old peak. A big loss compared to investors who just held on.
