Fear, Financial Markets, and Your Money

I’m a day late with this post because I spent most of yesterday fielding concerned phone calls and writing a market update letter for my clients. It’s during these volatile times that good advisers prove their worth to clients, and as you can imagine it’s also a stressful time.

With that said, I know that there are quite a few listeners that are new investment advisers, students studying to become investment professionals, and others that are considering making the jump. For those individuals: look around and absorb the experience! Bear markets typically only occur once or twice a decade and the lessons to be learned are tremendous. First hand, you see the importance of diversification, the relationship between risk and reward, and of course the importance of controlling your emotions.

When times are good it is easy to look at the average returns of the equity markets and jump in with the anticipation of letting your money work for you. Once there’s trouble on the horizon, that decision becomes cloudy and the desire for comfort and safety can take over.

Here’s a few items that I discuss on today’s show. Hopefully each of these items will help you determine if you’re making the right decisions with your current investment portfolio:

• The Cycle of Emotional Investing
• The Footsteps of Past Bear Markets – detailing the length of every Bear Market since World War II and losses
• What You Should Know in an Uncertain Market is an article that I wrote back in October of 2002. The information is very important because I provide words of advice that we can now look back on and see just how important it is to be in the markets when they recover
• Bill’s recent column on volatility
• Barron’s Online Article titled Avoid the Most Common and Costliest Mistakes in Retirement Investing by Karen Hube

Hopefully, this information will help you to make good decisions based upon your long-term goals and desire for financial independence. Learn to control your emotions with good planning and asset allocation, so that you do not make the dreaded Buy High and Sell Low mistake that plagues the average investor.

As I often do, I wanted to thank you for your continued support and for the great comments on Apple’s iTunes website. Without the grassroots growth of the show from great listeners like you, I could not do the Money Guy Show. Please continue to spread the word about the show and website 😉

Note: I will be headed out of town for a long weekend on Friday, but I already have a show pre-recorded. I tell you only because the show notes will probably be shorter than usual.

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