Stocks Now?
Q: Is it a good idea to get into stock market investing during these times? Is it better to wait until the stock market revives?
A:
If you are an actual investor and not a gambler, i suggest you contact
comix, ask him to put sillyness aside, and see what his low cost
reinvestment plan has to offer.
IMHO, avoid the shit out of mutual funds, those expensive tv ads are
taken right out of your backside.
To lose every buck you have, follow the investment gurus on TV and pu
cash into their top rated mutual funds. . . they will rip you off, leave
you for dead, and take the economy of the world with it.
It is ALWAYS a good time to put into stocks that make money, and have more
cash than debt, especially if they pay a dividend.
It depends on your time frame. It took about 25 years for those who bought in 1929
to break even. I suspect many of us will have to wait an equally long period of
time to break even as well.
OTOH... had your grandparents bought heavily, say IBM or GE, when all seemed
lost in 1936 (a recession inside a depression) you would not need to be reading
or posting in MIS.
Further, there is a wild card out there that wasn't during the GD, that
being the SWF's. Mohamad El-Erian of PIMCO, who studied the behavior of
developing nations in depth when he was running PEBIX, states in his
book that there is a phase where SWF's almost exclusively invest in US
Treasury debt for monetary reasons, but as internal demand forces
mature, they are forced to seek out riskier investments.
Simply put, China and ASEAN, Russia, and the Middle East (who have already
started this process) will, over a much shorter term than the 25
years cited above, stop buying Treasuries and start buying the Dow.
That's the point. A decently consructed portfolio just killed it. Now,
the big question was, could a reasonable investor in 1932 see the IBM or
the GE phenomenon coming, or were they complete shots in the dark? (Or,
how would you have done back then if 95% of your portfolio was in DIA
[theoretically] and 5% in GE?)