I"m still maxing my 401k but just switched my contribution to a bond fund, so it will probably sit there for a while. I'm new with the company, so I haven't had much of a total contribution yet. I met with my financial guy for my main retirement and have 1/3 in fixed income right now. I have alot of my personal in cash, which I've had for a while, then my "play" stocks which I've been building up. Hopefully I've mitigated some risk to additional downturn. I don't feel good about just selling off now though, so will probably hang tight for what I have. I"m sure it will go down some more, I just have to suck it up for a while.
You switch all of it to a Bond fund? Thats kind of what im thinking.. or at least a portion. Right, we have to assume stocks are going to plummet next week.. why not pull out, even just for one week, and then buy in next monday? What are the chances that in doing so, we miss on some growth day? Has to be slim.
Interesting.
About 4 months ago, sensing the market was over-valued, I literally moved everything in my 401(k)/457 accounts to fixed contract, and then 2 months ago I moved those 401(k)/457 fixed contract funds and consolidated it with an existing IRA with my financial advisor with those 401(k)/457 fixed contract dollars moving into iShares Short-Term Corporate Bond ETF (IGSB). The IRA was then adjusted to more of a dividend model of ETFs and stocks, along with IGSB.
In so doing, I missed a little of the peak market gains, but missed a good amount of the negative downturn.
That all said, in the last 3 days I have sold about half of the IGSB from my IRA and purchased SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY). The calculus was to sell IGSB with a negligible loss in order to purchase SPY that is down 25+%.
The market may still lose some more, but I, like others, are hoping we are nearing the bottom ... time will tell .. and once things hopefully settle down (average bear market is around 200 trading days) to be positioned for the steady climb back up later this year. A key will be to avoid some of the normally reliable stocks that unfortunately I fear are going to have a difficult time recovering from this current mess that we find ourselves in.