With life, with your financial plan, with your investments, stop looking for the next bad thing to come.
Why put yourself through that torture? No matter what you do, the future can’t be stopped.
The only thing you can do is to make the best decisions you can with the information you have today.
The way people worry about some looming bad news is strange to me. This “EVENT” has’t happened yet so feeling bad in advance is totally by choice.
We can control how we feel.
We can’t control the future.
But that’s what we do: we worry about the future and by worrying about the future, we miss out on opportunities today.
Cue the Breaking News:
The S&P is up around 6% Year to Date and yes on 8/21/2018 it reached an ALL TIME HIGH.
Before you go screaming at your financial adviser because your portfolio is not up 6% please know that not every asset class is up that much, or even up at all. And if you’re in a properly diversified portfolio that’s how it goes. Parts go up and parts go down with the goal to minimize volatility and maximize returns.
Are you invested? Or… has your worrying gotten the best of you.
North Korea
The President
Tariffs
Iran
….I can go on naming more and more things you could be worrying about. All of which are real concerns and things I worry about too BUT the difference is I do not make guesses about how they will affect the future and more specifically the stock market. I can’t worry about every possible outcome in advance. It would paralyze me….
Has it paralyzed you?
One solution to overcoming your fear is to implement a rules based investing strategy that is governed by a sound financial plan. Every major money decision you make should be pushing you toward your financial goals and objectives. Every investing decision you make should be based on back tested evidence. Neither one should be EMOTIONALLY driven. Emotion is what causes us to guess or gamble about the future.
And when we go gambling, the house always wins.
In that scenario you were worrying in advance and that caused you to make an emotional decision which was not in your best interest. So you went from worrying about an event, to miserable because either the bad event happened, which is bad, or it didn’t happen and you missed out which is bad! Either way, BAD.
A system to implement has defined rules that says when X happens I do Y, no matter what the current headlines are… Trend following, or momentum trading are 2 you can investigate here.
No system is perfect but anything that can remove emotion is a step in the right direction! Your future will be thankful you did.
So once again, build yourself a long term financial plan. Define your goals and make decisions that you feel will give you the best chance of accomplishing them. Invest your money to reach your goals and implement a system that guides you when to buy and sell that is based on something other than how you FEEL!
If you want help, if you need help, contact us today! These are things we do for our clients all day, every day.
-Jared
