If You Left the Market, Don’t Wait to Get Back In
That elusive ideal dip for reentry probably isn’t going to materialize, and delaying just costs more money.
The market beckons.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
There are only a few basic rules of investing: diversify, keep your costs low and probably most important, hang on when markets tumble occasionally. The last one is the trickiest. It’s not easy watching money vanish as the market plunges, particularly when many people, some of them highly respected, are carping about the end of the world, which invariably accompanies a market collapse.
So it was when Covid-19 sent U.S. stocks into a tailspin in late February. The S&P 500 Index shed a third of its value in just more than four weeks, one of the steepest retreats on record, amid widespread chatter that the pandemic would plunge the U.S. into a long depression, wiping out whole industries and permanently damaging broad swaths of the economy.