Sell anticipating correction or stay put ?

[karen1972]

Well I never sell on "anticipating", however when events occur it often triggers some rebalancing.

 

[audreyh1]

Well I never sell on "anticipating", however when events occur it often triggers some rebalancing.

Exactly!

 

[FREE866]

“If You’re Worried About What Things Are Going to Be Worth Next Week…You’re Going to Make Yourself Way Poorer 20 Years from Now”

 

[CSdot]

I don't remember the exact dates, but at some point I was down about 40% from my peak portfolio level during that 2009 market drop. It wasn't a big deal then, because I was what I considered a long way off from retiring, and the dollar amounts were still amounts that I could imagine earning back via additional investing. So it wasn't hard to stay the course and keep dollar cost averaging through it.

Nowadays, our net worth is 6-7 times what it was at the peak in 2007-2008, and we are only 5-10 years away from potentially retiring. A 40-50% decline in our retirement assets would be feel catastrophic. Staying the course would be too difficult without my 33% bond/cash allocation, IMO.

We are in the same boat, and experienced a similar 40% of so loss in all of the past 3 crashes (2000, 2008 and in Feb/March 2020). So glad the 2020 market came back as quickly as it did. Like you, our nest egg was many many many times larger in 2020 than it was in 2000 or 2008. Heck, the nest egg including the home equity has nearly doubled 2020 in the time since the crash and Summer 2021. Glad I didn’t miss that increase (Spring 2020-Summer 2021).

The 2008 crash took about 5 years for the market to get back to where it was pre-crash. The 2000 NASDAQ crash took forever to recover. The 1929 crash took over a decade to recover to pre-crash levels.

Experiencing the 2020 crash was more like watching a 2 hour movie about the Great Depression/Big Short/Dot Com in comparison. Sit down, eat your popcorn, stress out as you relive the crash for a couple of hours, but before you realize it, the show is over and you are walking out of the theater back into the mall or shopping center.