A good day to sell?

[beanmaestro]

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been working up the courage to move a good chunk of the stocks in my 401k & Roth to some combination of money markets, bonds, and gold. I know this isn’t new news around here, but I’m feeling like today is a good day to start pulling the trigger.

Most of the affected money is in Vanguard & Fidelity, so I need to put in the order by 1pm to lock down today’s gains. I’m thinking of going from 85% stocks to 40% stocks, probably in two or three chunks in the next couple weeks. This would be chunk #1.

Thoughts?

And yes, I should talk to Rich about this, though I’m up in Santa Barbara, and I’m not sure it’s a workable arrangement from here. Rich, if you’re reading this, either email me at dr.mrow (@t) gmail, or expect an email a bit later today. Meeting now.

[PadreBrian]

Gold Stocks, and Canadian oil are safe bets. The Canadian dollar is almost even with the sinking US dollar.

[sdworker]

I hear you. It took me a long time to do it and I finally pulled the trigger last month. I moved almost 100% of my 401(k) into a money market option in August. I am close to finalizing what I will do with it. I am lucky in that I have an option to go into a self-directed brokerage account within my 401(k). This means I get to pick almost any mutual fund available in the US. I have found some foreign mutual fund options that have limited exposure the the US Dollar and have moved some into them. Then gold for sure. Energy too. Believe me the fear factor was huge having built it up so much over the last 10 years, but I found myself giddy once I did it. You will feel relief – I promise you. I did. I can even stand seeing things go really well in the stock market for the rest of the year. I just don’t feel very positive for the next couple years at all.

[beanmaestro]

My thinking here was that, looking at the market, I’m not sure it’ll go down, but I’m fairly sure the downside risk > upside opportunity right now. So it only makes sense to have less than 50% in stocks, and more than 50% in the buy-at-the-bottom fund. Once I realied this, it made sense to take some of the money off the table while the market is ~5% below peak.

But you’re right, having had 90-100% in stocks in the last few years, doing so is weird and uncharted territory

[Author]

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