Hello everyone,
I'd just like to say I appreciate the extent of knowledge and opinions on this bulletin board. I have been lurking for about a week (as well as on other financially inclined forums and sites) to get others' insight into recent events.
Anyhow, I'm relatively new to investments as a whole, although I do understand the jist of the basics. I don't have much of a nest egg for myself to invest as I'm just starting to save money, however my father who is a hard working in a blue collar industry, has a 401k and I wanted to get insight for him. He obviously has lost a good amount from his retirement account in the past year, before hand however his small sized employer used to rely on some sort of profit sharing program and totally managed his portfolio/savings along with the other employees in the past. However about late last year they switched to a retirement account/401k system with a financial institution (Principal) I assume to save costs - these accounts are your typical style, giving a selection of different funds in the fixed income, value and growth equites etc, as well as those Life cycle style funds that allocate for you. Anyhow, my father picked one of the life cycle funds late last year (2020 fund - he's in his mid 50s) , he didn't know really what to do and no one really gave advice, but he heard others saying since it's in the middle of the road of the funds providing it should be alright since its supposedly diversified (the employees had to decide in a quick meeting with the Principal rep at their work-sight). He doesn't know much about investments strategies and the representative from Principal was very rude to the employees and was on a time schedule apparently and was passive on where the workers' allocated their money too.
Anyhow long story short, he has lost about ~30% with this downturn as others had, in a panic one of this fellow coworkers told him to move it to the Money Market fund which he did on Oct 10 unfortunately. So I told him he would probably have been best served to not have moved it as that was most likely the bottom. However, now I'm not sure what he should do, I would like to give him some isight myself, but I know picking bottoms can be rough and people do brash things when they see their hard earned savings take a hit.
In his case, would it be better to get back in now? Or might as well wait until the market stabilizes since he's already pulled out? I know he can move his account online back to the funds whenever he wishes.
Any insight would be appreciated on this.
regards,
James