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Good Morning Friends,
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today is Tuesday December 22, 2009
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( and weather report )
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It was a fairly decent day at work yesterday friends and I made my out to Abbotsford and back. The weather is still kind of crappy, however, but it is supposed to pick up starting today.
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I guess I am mostly focused on the stock market right now and monitoring my retirement portfolio more than anything else. I am getting conflicting opinions about where the markets are heading. Actually, if you want to the truth of the matter it is not much sense in listening to the pundits at all. And that is because some of them are going to be right and some of them are going to be wrong. I suppose the only advice that I can give you right now is to just stay invested if you believe in the integrity of the stock market. That is about all that I can say about the whole thing at this point. I know that it is difficult to stay invested sometimes, especially when the market can be so volatile and uncertain at times. I mean, it is either just economic conditions themselves or even the political events that have a way of upsetting one's serenity and can make a person question just why he is in the market to begin with. Now, I am not a stock professional or even close to it. I am just a person trying to save for his retirement and the stock market is one of those tools that is available to me. So, I think it is incumbent upon all of us who are interested in our future to at least make an attempt to understand the whole thing and how it works. And, that is why I monitor my portfolio pretty closely ( and yes even listen to the pundits ) and make changes to it as I deem necessary. One thing that you will learn, however, that it is not possible to even achieve success by doing that ( changing things around ) and that is because of the nature of the animal itself; you simply cannot control this beast known as the market. So, you just have to stay invested and hang on tight to your chair sometimes because it can be a very rough ride indeed. My advice would be to not pay much attention to the touts or the so called experts because like I said above half of them are right and half of them are wrong. So, that makes the stock market and trying to figure it out some kind of a mugs game to a degree. How do I handle all of this craziness? I am generally a buy and hold person as I have pointed out to you, with some qualifications. I like to shift my stuff around once in a while because that gives me the feeling of control and the idea that I am saving my capital, which is the name of the game of course. Also, I like to maintain a certain balance between equities, bonds, and cash, depending on the direction of the market and general economic conditions. For example, right now I am about 38% equity and the rest is mostly cash related things and a smattering of bonds. These are all mutual funds of course. Year-to-date my gains are about 12.70% and I have mostly recovered my losses from 2008 as well. In fact, there was one day, not too long ago, where I did in fact recover all of those losses.
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