Remember the old adage about how to make money in the stock market? It’s “buy low and sell high.”
This is done over the long-term on a regular basis if you are disciplined and adhere to an asset allocation strategy.
Assume that your ideal portfolio is 50% stocks and 50% bonds. If stocks have a good run and the stock portion grows to 60% and bonds are now 40% you sell some of the stocks that have given you a nice profit and bring the portfolio back into the 50/50 balance.
Suppose the opposite happens: the stock market declines and the portfolio now consists of 40% stocks and 60% bonds. Now you sell some of the bonds to buy more cheap stocks, bringing the balance back to 50/50.
In this way it’s possible that you can make a fair return on your portfolio even if – over the long term – neither the stock or bond market actually rises but simply fluctuates.
For disciplined long-term investors, this shows “the importance of continuing to invest when the annual return stream is uneven and especially when stocks are down,” writes Carlson, an investment analyst at the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich. …
In plainer terms, a steady infusion of capital in good times and bad is better for portfolio performance than turning the spigot on and off in reaction to the inevitable ups and downs of the bourse. For Carlson, discipline in bear markets is more important than “optimizing” externals such as investment costs and tax efficiencies for separating “successful investors from the crowd.”
Interested in a disciplined approach to investing?
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