Investment Strategy

How to Take Advantage of A Down Market

· March 9, 2016 · Investment Strategy · , · No Comments

This article was originally published on NerdWallet.com

You’ve heard the old saying about investing success: Buy low and sell high. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? The problem is, no one knows exactly where the peaks and valleys are until after the market has reached them. That’s why it’s important to have an investment plan and stick to it.

How can the average investor find success in buying low and selling high? Here’s the secret: continually contribute to a diversified portfolio and rebalance it when your portfolio’s allocation falls outside its target range.

The Secret: Dollar Cost Averaging

Dollar-cost averaging is the key to a long-term investment strategy. It means contributing a set amount of money to your portfolio on a regular basis.

If you contribute to a 401(k) or 403(b) plan, you’re already doing this; every time you get paid, a certain percentage of your paycheck is deposited and immediately invested into your portfolio. There’s no consideration of market conditions. It doesn’t matter if the market is up or down; your money will get invested.

Here’s where the magic happens with dollar-cost averaging: When the market is down, it’s like getting your investments at a discount. You get to buy more shares of the same investment for less money.

Compare that to the alternative — a lump-sum portfolio, in which a larger sum is invested at one time, without regular additional contributions. With lump-sum investing, the available cash has already been invested, and taking advantage of sale prices becomes more difficult.

How Do I Benefit When the Market Recovers?

When you’re contributing regularly to your investment portfolio and purchasing shares at a discount during a bear market, you increase your upside potential when the market recovers.

When you take a lump sum of money and invest it, you initially have many more shares in a given investment than you would have if you spread those contributions out over a longer time. When the market declines, your lump-sum portfolio declines with it, but you’re not buying any additional shares at a discount like you are with your dollar-cost-averaged portfolio. You could end up with the same number of shares in both portfolios, but the average price per share in the dollar-cost-averaged portfolio will be lower.

This is why your 401(k) and 403(b) portfolios will seem to perform better than your lump-sum investment portfolio. In fact, they often do perform better because, over the long term, you end up purchasing your investment shares at a lower overall cost per share. So when the market recovers, you can be proud of yourself for buying at the bottom.

Stay Invested for the Long-Term

Dollar-cost averaging gives you an advantage over lump-sum investing, but in either case it’s important to stay the course and stay invested. Heading to the sidelines during market volatility greatly reduces your chances of long-term investment success.

The key phrase here is “long term.” If you are investing for the short term, market volatility is not your friend, and frankly, you probably shouldn’t be investing at all. Having a short-sighted view of the market causes many to abandon ship at the worst possible time and potentially end up buying high and selling low — the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

If you do have a lump-sum investment portfolio, don’t fear. You can still take advantage of market downturns by rebalancing your portfolio. What this means is that you move money out of the best-performing asset classes — whether they be stocks, bonds or Treasuries — and into the underperforming asset classes. This allows you to maintain your target asset allocation and helps you avoid being “overweighted” in an asset class that has performed well but may decline in the future. This is the essence of buying low and selling high.

Be the Tortoise

Although market downturns are no fun, they’re inevitable. The reason you have the potential to receive higher rates of return on your investments is because you take on the risk of losing money.

The best advice is to be the tortoise, not the hare. When you’re in the accumulation stage and building your nest egg, practice a slow and steady approach to investing. Stay the course, no matter what the markets are doing.

On the other hand, during the decumulation stage of your portfolio, you may need to minimize your exposure to equities to protect yourself from not having the money when you need it. Most importantly, during this stage, make sure your retirement income plan accounts for the inevitability of market downturns — and follow through on that plan.

I hope this gives you the confidence you need to stick to your investment plan no matter what is happening in the markets. If you don’t have a plan, start building one and set the goal of seeing it through.

For more financial planning tips, download my free report: “8 Steps to Organize and Optimize Your Financial Life”. Thanks for reading!

Keep Calm and Invest On

· January 26, 2016 · Investment Strategy · , , · No Comments

No doubt, there has been a great deal of drama on Wall Street lately. However, long-term investors need to stay focused on their objectives and try to avoid being influenced by their emotions. That being said, money you need soon should not be invested in the stock market. It’s too risky to expose that money to market fluctuations. If you do, the money may not be there when you need it. Instead, look for safer alternatives to park money for short-term goals and keep your long-term money invested appropriately for your risk tolerance, time-horizon and goals.

Retirees, on the other hand, may have a more challenging issue to deal with when they continue to withdraw money from their portfolio during downturns. If staying the course isn’t an option, consider reducing your withdrawals. This forbes article, 5 tips To Survive Stock Market Volatility in Retirement, gives great advice to retirees for dealing with this potential problem.

To provide additional perspective on the recent stock market volatility, here are some thoughts and smart advice from Bob Veres, owner of Inside Information and former Editor of Financial Planning Magazine:

Since 1950, the U.S. markets have experienced a decline of between 5% and 10% (the territory we’re in already) in 35.5% of all calendar years—which is another way of saying that this recent drawdown is entirely normal. One in five years (22.6%) have experienced drawdowns of 10-15%, and 17.7% of our last 56 stock market years have seen downturns, at some point in the year, above 20%.

For long-term investors, the result is much the same as if you went to the grocery store and discovered that the prices had fallen roughly 5% across the board. At first, you might think this is a great bargain. But then you might wonder whether the prices will be even lower tomorrow or next week. One thing you probably WOULDN’T worry about is whether prices will eventually go back up; you know they always have in the past after these sale events expire.

Will they? The truth is, nobody knows—and if you see pundits on TV say with certainty that they know where the markets are going, your first impulse should be to laugh, and your second should be to check their track record for predicting the future. Without a working crystal ball, it’s hard to know whether the markets are entering a correction phase which will make stocks even cheaper to buy, or whether people will wake up and realize that they don’t have to share the panic of Chinese investors on this side of the ocean. The good news is there appears to be no major economic disruption like the Wall Street derivatives mess that triggered the 2008 downturn. The best, sanest investors will once again watch the markets for entertainment purposes—or just change the channel.

Sources:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-the-heck-are-the-markets-tanking-165146322.html

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f248931e-b4e5-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b2f.html#axzz3wc533ghn