Yep. Everybody's situation is different. If I was close to retirement I would be cashing out soon. Probably going to take at least a 20% haircut with the next correction coming. As you said everybody's investment strategy will differ with your age and risk appetite, among other factors..
We took a real high six figure cut with the 2008-9 "correction," if you want to call it that. In addition, our income took a cut, since the business law part of what we do almost completely died. We really didn't have a choice but to grit our teeth and stay in the market and try just to ignore the daily financial news. That turned out to be the wise choice. What really bothers me at this point is that I don't think the Wall Street abuses which caused the last disaster have really been corrected. The market which had come to exist - and still does - reminds me greatly of a huge rigged carnival game, except that the rigging is done by extremely powerful computers. It's far, far from a "free market." I remember a county fair here back in the early 80s. My date and I wandered by the basketball game. We stopped and I told her "Wait and I'll win you a teddy bear." I saw they'd raised the goal height by 2" and shrunk the rim a bit. I popped five in a row and won the teddy bear for her (about a 4' stuffed animal). I stepped up to the line again and the operator said "You're done for the night." That kind of stuff reminds me of the market today...
Yea the stock market is controlled by the same thing that most things in this world are controlled by: people with the most money. Just last week a stock was at $50/share. Analysts and hedge funds downgraded the stock to "sell" and of course it caused a selloff down to $40/share. The very next day that same stock was "bought out" for $72/share. So who was buying during the selloff? The same hedge funds and analysts who downgraded the stock to get the price down. The stock market is a crooked world..
That's bad enough, but that was going on, pre-computer. Now, a fund can place a huge buy order and the computers sense it and buy ahead by milliseconds, driving up the price. The same thing happens on the other end. There are remedies possible, but the problem is that the folks opposing any real reform literally have billions of dollars at hand (a lot of which dollars are yours and mine) for lobbying. I don't see any meaningful reform coming anytime soon. Without reforms, the system, IMO, will crash again and the recovery will be even longer than from 2008...
Yea I watched a documentary on how they trade in milliseconds with those computers now. Really shady stuff..
Not only not liquid, but taxes and insurance (and upkeep) can be costly if left vacant for any length of time; of course, if you take section 8 you won't have to worry about that too much. Then the only worry you'll have is that when they do move, you have to practically rebuild.
