I think, we will be OK. If DJT totally trashes everything, we would probably be better off staying just where we are.
Only if I knew the timing, and I could not.
Also, what sidelines? Paul Krugman recently wrote that even Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are not safe because we soon cannot trust Trump administration inflation statistics.
I was 80% equities 20% cash and bonds.
Now I’m 66% equities, 10% money market (dry powder; but at least I’m getting about 1% above inflation), 23% bond funds (mostly total bond market index, which is giving 5%)
To get there I sold a Nasdaq 100 fund that I’d bought in 2016, which was up about 350% since then. I figured I keep exposure to virtually all of those in my S&P 500 and hell, when up something like 325% I say again: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. I made the moves in late Feb.
I truly believe that come April we’re going to start seeing some pretty awful numbers.
I also figure I was a bit heavy in equities so it wasn’t a terrible idea to move some to bonds anyway.
And as people have said: They can publish (or not) whatever data they want, but you can’t fool the bond market.
These are all just my opinions, of course.
I wanted to, a month before the crash. Maybe I didn’t know it was coming, but I could see it coming. I did not know how to convert my 401(k) investments to ‘cash’, so I had to watch it lose more than half its value. It more than recovered under Obama.
But yes, I would have done it in 2007. I’ve done it now. I only wish I had done it Friday morning instead of Monday morning.
Fully agree that bad times are coming! However…
It’s one thing to correctly anticipate a bad economy. It’s something else entirely to get out of the stock market at the right time and, later, get back in at the right time. As I had to learn the hard way, the market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent.
I have acknowledged, repeatedly, that I’ve always been that guy saying “Don’t try to time the market”
For the first time in 30 years I’m not taking my own advice. And I am still 66% in equities.
And really, to be successful, I only have to move back in before it passes the point at which I got out. Earlier is better, of course.
That’s for sure. I could survive one or the other…….I’d hate it, but I could survive…. but not both.
Some of this thread was veering into advice and what people are doing with their money, and I was going to respond to some of that, but I thought maybe we should just have a thread for discussing all things about investing. Including what you’ve been doing, advice, predictions for the future, etc. Feel free to post there if you want to discuss this stuff in more depth.
“America is going to be Trump’s seventh bankruptcy.”
I’m up 6K for YTD but down 2k just today.
That isn’t good at all.
“You’ll stop receiving your monthly social security check, but isn’t that a small price to pay to keep perverts in dresses out of your granddaughters’ bathrooms?”
I can’t believe anyone is that stupid, but then I remembered Covid.
As I said, I don’t have a lot of money. To protect what little I had, I converted to the Money Market Fund on Monday morning (losing about $1,200 over the weekend). I’ve started keeping a spreadsheet.
| Date | Amount | Contribution | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 03/03/25 | 195,457.74 | ||
| 03/04/25 | 194,263.93 | -1,193.81 | |
| 03/05/25 | 194,412.55 | 106.25 | 148.62 |
| 03/06/25 | 194,416.98 | 4.43 |
I’m just flabbergasted. The NASDAQ is down 3% in just over an hour, and the S&P 2%
I mean, there has to be a purpose here, no? I’m trying to come up with some reason why he would WANT this market chaos, and the only thing I can figure is that he’s letting his buddies know when he’ll make these crazy proclamations so they can buy/sell the chaos?
And at some point, shouldn’t all those rich Republicans be calling their reps and senators and asking them to do something? There are about a million people who have 10 million or more in the US, and presumably they’re really feeling this.
It’s hard not to conclude that Trump wants chaos in general and thrives on it. As long as people are talking about him, it’s all good.
I have to wonder, how much of this is Trump thinking he knows better than everyone else about everything? For example, someone tells him tariffs are a bad idea, so that makes him more determined to follow through with them?
It’s right wing economic policy. Which has NEVER worked. But they will never stop trying to implement it.
We have a better economy when government is something of a check on big business. Right wingers hate this and think government should openly favor money and big business. This approach causes corruption, concentration of wealth, and recession sooner or later. But no lesson has ever been learned from this and they are more determined than ever to implement these policies yet again.
The only theories that I know of/have thought of are:
- He’s a foreign asset.
- He was a pro-labor lefty back when offshoring began, back in the 1970s, and is trying to finally do the thing that, as a young lad, he felt convinced that he could do, to stop offshoring. (Of course, it’s now too late and already was even at the time that he joined the Reform Party.)
- He thought that with Ross Perot’s Refom Party being so small he could quickly rise to prominence in it, took on their message, hired ghost writers to create books attaching him to that political message, and after some decades of association, he feels like he’s painted himself into a corner of either needing to follow through or admit to hypocricy.
- He’s practicing hard bargaining, to get great deals for America.
Republicans in congress keep saying that it’s #4. I’m not 100% sold on this, though, since the only thing that he’s asked for from Canada is that they stop the flow of fentanyl - which is, of course, nonsense. There’s probably more fentanyl flowing from America to Canada than the other way around, all of that is very minimal anyways, and we already have efforts underway (via Biden) to ramp that up, already. The only reasonable agenda that I’ve heard put forward is that Canada back the US on tariffing the hell out of China. Except…apparently that was Sheinbaum’s idea, and the plan was that Mexico, the US, and Canada would team up against China. So far as has come out in public, there’s nothing that Trump wants from Canada that’s an actual, real thing so there’s no actual bargaining happening on that side.
Numbers 2 and 3 are still plausible, just dumb.
can some of you 'muricans speak to this? … what % of the 3 states receive energy from Canada? … is it just fringes or are we talking about Michigan as a whole.
any ballpark figures on how many people would possibly be impacted (assuming it is NOT saber-rattling)?
This time for sure! Nothing up my sleeve…
In flux, of course; but according to the tickers on Yahoo the NASDAQ is down almost 4%, the S&P is down 2.7%, and the DOW 30 is down 2%.