[quote=plm][quote=Coronita]I moved my trading account back to more of a cash holding again by selling half of everything.
I guess I’m just thinking with all the social media i-gen stars now talking about the stock market and how easy it is to make money, and anyone can do it… Reminds me of old times when a financially illiterate receptionist could be heard talking about how easy it is to make money in the stock market during coffee breaks back in 2000.
If we see a correction, maybe I’ll slowly move things back in. Otherwise, I’m contend with things this year.
Less greedy, more caution.[/quote]
I suppose the question really is given the strong demand for stocks (there really isn’t anything else to invest in), how high does it go before it breaks down. I think it can go up alot more before it crashes. And if it does crash earlier, I’ll just ride it out. I don’t think my main holdings like Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft and AMD are going to go bankrupt. Well maybe AMD could go down alot if Intel performs better. But at that point I’ll be playing with house money.[/quote]
I think it’s tough to guess the absolutely bottom or top. For me, taking a step back, the way to look at it is….Is 40% YTD really typical, or way out of the norm? If so, why be greedy and try to go after an additional 10, 20, 30%? It was a total fluke and total luck that when covid hit, that the markets didn’t crater any further than it did. Things could have gone really bad the other way for everyone that jumped back into the markets into individual stocks.
I was already content if I could see 4-6% in a year I thought the markets would have gotten trashed after covid. You already beat most of the people that thought covid would have taken the entire markets down and either sat out this year, or god forbid shorted the markets when they thought covid would have made things much worse. You already beat all the folks that were hoping for that big crash to get back in the markets but didn’t think the covid correction was big enough. And you also beat all the people who lost their job who had to either cash out the 401k or didn’t have any additional disposable income to speculate, because they were worried about putting food on the table and paying for rent or their mortgage. (some empathy for those folks because who got hit and who didn’t because of covid was also some random luck thing…plenty of workers plenty of business owners got hit pretty hard in the same exact way.) Relatively speaking, anything else from this point on is just icing on the cake, and personally one needs to seriously consider the risk versus reward from here on out imho.
The way for me to self discipline is to put that money to another use that is way less risky, even if it loses some money or stays flat. Eventually, you’re luck is going to run out. And you won’t know when.
