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I'm puzzled as to why you feel you are doing a good deed by "staying in the market." All this means is that you own the stocks you own instead of somebody else owning them. How does that help the country?
Presumably, you believe that when large numbers of people rush to sell their stocks, the market tanks, and that's a bad thing. If people would only refrain from doing this, the market would not crash, and everybody would be happy. You want to be one of the good guys who are not contributing to the problem.
I find this laudable, but quite frankly, misguided. When the stock market plunges as it is now doing, people often say things like "everybody is selling, and that's why we're having a crash." This is a fallacy. For every seller there is always a buyer, otherwise there is no transaction. This is true regardless of whether the market is rising or falling.
It would be more accurate to say, "the market is falling because the vast majority of investors feel it is overpriced, and have agreed to transact business at a much lower price."
Perhaps you see "panic selling" in the same light as other "unpatriotic" behavior like, say littering the highways. You know that if everybody would refrain from littering, our country would be more beautiful, and therefore, you want to do your part. Similarly, you want to hold onto rather than dump your shares because if everyone would do this, the markets would be okay.
Unfortunately, this too is a fallacy. As I mentioned above, there are just as many people buying, even now, as there are selling. The market has fallen because a consensus has emerged that it was overvalued. At the market's relatively high values of a few weeks ago, there were indeed more people willing to sell than to buy. Prices fell, and will continue to fall, until equilibrium is reached.
Theoretically, your decision not to sell might have an infinitesimal effect on where that equilibrium settles. But for the overwhelming majority of investors, deciding at what point to sell and when to buy has nothing to do with patriotism or good will, and is a result of hard-nosed calculation (or fuzzy intuition, or emotion) and nothing more. People like yourself who believe that they are doing a good deed by attempting to influence the markets in a "good" direction by buying, selling, or refraining from buying or selling will always be a tiny minority, and will have no effect.
The bottom line: you can't influence the market by basing your investment decisions not on hard facts, but on what you think is "right," but you may suffer financial losses by doing this. Therefore, it would seem more prudent to abandon any such attempts, and to base your decisions solely on economic factors.
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