Bear Market?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YexQcXnVSzg

Everybody still indifferent and closing their eyes?  Usually it gets worse and worse until people start seriously panicking.  Dow down 500+ today but then bounced back a bit.

Silly people investing in equities....I moved all my $$ to oil futures like a year ago!

If you are in the market long-term there is no need to panick.

Jasmo said:

Everybody still indifferent and closing their eyes?  

If you're in it for the long-haul, what other approach makes any sense? 

I dunno - what's the long term these days?  

eliz said:

I dunno - what's the long term these days?  

Depends on when you plan/hope to retire.  If you're near, at, or beyond retirement age, hopefully you've moved at least some of your retirement funds to less volatile/safer places.

It's all about oil.

Lesson learned after many years of investing: Decide upon your appropriate (and diversified) allocation, and stick with it. Don't be swayed by the noise of up and down markets. 

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yahooyahoo said:

If you are in the market long-term there is no need to panick.

Yeah, we keep saying this but I haven't made any decent money on my 401k in over a decade. A few years decent 5,6,7% return years erased/ eroded by a few similarly bad years. Have a grand total of $800 less in my account than I did Jan 1 2015 after a year of investing. A 1% return on investment plus my contributions should have had me up around $10,000. On top of that, now down $18k total from 1/1/2016. 

Yeah the market has been vicious lately. I've been buying some emerging markets (ticker VWO), a little at a time as it falls. It feels good each time I buy it and lower my average cost, but then it feels bad when it goes down more from there!

I have a reasonably long-term investing horizon of 10-20 years, so while this period is definitely painful, I'll be in decent/good shape as long as stuff bounces back sometime within the next decade or two. 

The problem is, while stocks *should* bounce back in that timeframe, there's no assurance that they *will* bounce back!