redduck said:
It appears that people who contribute to this board are well-disciplined regarding their investment strategies.
Right now we're all looking over our shoulders and trying to figure out who the heck you're talking about.
redduck said:
But, the question is: what kind of news event might cause you to pull out 25-50% (or more) of your investment in the market?
I can't think of one, and that's the whole idea behind rebalancing. If our asset allocation got out of whack by more than 5% (e.g., small caps rose from 25% to 31% of the
total) then we'd sell/buy to get things more in line. Maybe a big drop would cause us to sell off a bloated asset and take our time getting back into another asset, but that type of dirty market timing has been fraught with disappointment. In a sharp drop (bad news, a terrorist attack, whatever) we'd probably jump too quickly, and in a slow hemorrhage we probalby wouldn't notice the problem in time.
redduck said:
Second part: what sort of news event might cause you to add much more to the market than you had planned?
Hey, we can answer that one. We keep an eye on our ETFs and a few stocks we wouldn't mind owning. When the prices drop at least 10% into bargain territory then we start getting alerts from Fidelity's website and we can watch the numbers.
We bought Apple at $11/share when they had $5/share cash, we bought Disney at $17.69/share after 9/11, we bought Berkshire Hathaway several times on sale between $2050-$2200/share, and we bought a small-cap value ETF several times during the 2003-2004 recovery. Of course we sold the Apple stock at $16/share when we felt we'd made an obscene profit, and we've bought a few other stocks well before we should have. But we've learned a lot (including patience) and our trading activity has slowed considerably.
As for the rest of you guys, I'm surprised you didn't hand Jarhead a load of crap for giving birth to a fully-grown homemaker wife in 1966 at the same time he was having those two kids. That must've been a series of serious medical miracles!