That’s what I was going to say. Perverse as it may feel, a market downturn is kind of a good thing if you’re not near retirement age. If you just keep funding it during the downturn, you’re buying stock at a lower price, which you will profit from when the market eventually recovers.
Ya know, I really think it’s fine to keep it simple. Stick with the “retirement year” funds*, use a reputable broker (I have nothing negative to say about Fidelity), and recognize that, at least for now, you’re playing the long game.
mmm
(*If you’re adventurous go ahead and stick 25% or so in the earlier-decade fund for a while)
I doubt there is any difference between the 2040 and the 2050 target date funds, though I have not looked at them.
There may not be today but there will be in a few years.
The conventional wisdom is that you can’t time the market. Nevertheless I say if the your stock portfolio goes down 10%, THEN move to Money Market. Watch for the bottom. When the consensus is the economy is in recovery, move back to an Index Fund and take a free ride.
Then again I “what the bleep do **I** know?”
How exactly do you “watch for the bottom”?
Definitely don’t do this. Haven’t you been paying attention to the people here who have successfully built wealth?
I am always glad to serve as a bad example. I cannot argue with the advice to listen to those who have been successful.
I was convinced of this during both of his terms and missed out on extended periods of market gains.
Never underestimate the stupidity and greed of investors who keep buying stocks and others who keep spending in the face of bad news and worse predictions.
It figures that at least a semi-crash is bound to occur…sometime. Hedge your bets, and as Puddin’ Head Wilson once said, keep an eye on that basket.
How is doing the exact right thing stupidity? How is it greedy to invest part of your paycheck into index funds in a retirement account. That is the actual subject of the thread.
You seem bitter about your bad decisions and probably aren’t the best person to give investment advice.
My IRA is in European Defense-related funds & stocks.
I think a better approach, if you have to time the market, is to move money into bonds or money market funds when the market is high. Not all, of it, but this way you lock in some gains. Of course it is likely that the market will continue to go up, and you haven’t maximized your gains, but you are still protected when it goes down.
I give you the idiots who precipitated a huge decline in stock market prices Tuesday because Trump ordered new Iran bombings, followed by an equal jump in prices Wednesday afternoon because he canceled more bombings. Nothing changed in the overall war situation, but idiots suddenly decided it was happy days are here again.
If you feel confident investing retirement funds heavily or entirely in stocks under such circumstances and have no diversification plan, you go on right ahead.
This is basically what we did.
What difference does the decline on Tuesday followed by the jump on Wednesday make to my retirement accounts, given that I bought into the market decades ago and won’t be withdrawing for decades?
In 1990 I had a bunch of student debt and no assets other than some furniture and a shitty pick-up truck. I did all of my own investing and in 2020 I retired at 56 as a self made multi-millionaire. You?
If I was, like the OP, 38 years old and planning on retiring in 25 years or so, I would be extremely confident investing heavily in stocks. We are supposed to be answering that question.
I’m older now and I am more conservatively invested but that’s a different situation.
If you know you won’t need to touch that dough for 20-30 years, your tolerance for loony dips and peaks as well as impending longer term sell-offs is likely to be different than that of a person who’s been retired for awhile and depends on funds they have currently in retirement accounts to be relatively secure.
Maybe that SpaceX investment will turn out great, eventually…
Wow, can I subscribe to your newsletter? 
It’s called The Rantings of an Old Man.
I think you understand the disconnect now. We were originally giving advice to someone not planning on retiring for decades.
This is really excellent perspective, especially for someone like the OP. Market dips (and even big significant dips like 2008 or COVID) are going to happen over the long term. These are not times to shift focus from the long-term to the short-term - they are times when you maintain your momentum and buy at a discount.
Have a plan, assess your risks at the beginning of your journey, stick to the plan. If at some point you realize you vastly underestimated your risk tolerance, you come up with a new plan.
In fact, I heard somewhere that hypothetically if retirements accounts and index funds existed in 1929, if someone had funded their retirement account just before the crash, the best move still would have been to hold on to their investments and ride out the Depression, and continue funding it if possible. The account would have recovered it’s value by some time in the 1940s and continued to grow.
Of course given the high unemployment rate at the time I know in reality people probably couldn’t have afforded to do that. The above is just meant as a hypothetical thought experiment.
That’s a good illustration. The first modern index fund was started in 1976 by Jack Bogle. There is no point since then where a thirty year return with regular investments would have been a bad call.
He was hated and criticized by the investment community because those white shoe assholes thought that they could do better (they most certainly couldn’t) and mainly because it significantly cut into their fees. His family lost everything in the Depression and he grew up poor so he also wasn’t Old Money enough for them. No one made more regular people wealthy than he did.