Wednesday, January 9, 2008

2008 Market Decline

So, I take some time off from posting for the new year and the market tanks.

First of all, Happy New Year to all of my readers. I hope you were able to take some time off around the holidays. I found it hard to pry myself away from work, but I managed to do so and really enjoyed the downtime.

The Dow closed at 13,500 on December 26th and has since fallen about 1,000 points. Hopefully there's more to come (allthough the market rallied today). People are as pessimistic as ever on the future of the housing market, gold is nearing $900 an ounce, oil touched $100 a barrel for one brief trade (but based on the rumors I've heard it was the minimum contract amount and the trade was just done by a person looking for bragging rights).

Looks like it's going to be an interesting year.

2 comments:

SavingDiva said...

With the market down, I'm unsure of how to invest my retirement accounts. I won't need the money for at least another 40 years, but I'm oblivious of how to make the most of the low stock market.

MoneyMan said...

I don't know everything about your situation but I have a long term plan for my retirement funds and these short-term fluctuations don't change it at all. If you're doing what I'm doing and having money automatically taken out of your paycheck and deposited into a 401(k) or IRA composed of diversified, low-cost index funds, then you don't need to do anything at all but just continue on with your plan. You'll be buying more shares when stocks are lower ("dollar cost averaging").

I mentioned buying some individual stocks, but I only do this with "play money," not the retirement funds I'm going to be relying on 30 years or so from now. Currently I have less than 1% of my networth in this "play money" account. Moving in and out of stocks is too dangerous for the vast majority of people to risk their retirement money on for a variety of reasons.