Should I sell all my investments before Trump stuns the nation...

[progree]

19. Back in '08 and '09 -- Actually I was buying like crazy

(and selling too, since I didn't have much "new money&quot

[font color = blue]>>I can count on one finger the number of my clients that were burning up my phone after March of '09 (when the market bottomed and started back up) with buy orders.<<[/font]

I had inherited a lot of stuff in late '05, and along with my own stuff I had accounts at about 6 different brokerages at least. It was in the '08 and '09 period when I got around to consolidating and simplifying all that -- selling what I didn't want and using the proceeds to buy, yes, gasp, equities (equity mutual funds).

The nice thing with the selling of what I sold at the bottom is that I had lovely capital losses (for tax purposes) that I'm still using up ($3,000 / year offset my regular income, plus offsetting the inevitable forced capital gains distributions). So it was a lovely lovely time to do the consolidation / simplification / cleaning (while still maintaining my overall equity allocation by buying replacement equities).

I even set up margin accounts at the 3 financial institutions I retained, and was thinking of buying equities via margin loans in the '08 - '09 period, but the margin loan disclosure stuff was so scary that I didn't. Drat drat drat. But at least, on net, I hung on to my equity allocation at a very scary time.

[font color = blue]>>TimING the market is not nearly as important as time IN the market. <<[/font]

Timing would be a fabulous tool, but I don't know anybody who has done it consistently well (aside claims in investment newsletters which I ignore, where they are all sterling geniuses). The vast majority of investors -- as shown by studies by Dalbar and others -- get it backwards -- selling after say a 20%-30% drop, and not buying again until the market has recovered and gone way above its old peak. A big loss compared to investors who just held on.