After taking a few days off to celebrate my daughter’s birthday, I wanted to come back and address the red you might be seeing in your portfolio. I have dropped, most have dropped, it’s a tough time right now.
This is the time that we hold and wait, you don’t lose money unless you sell. A perfect quote from Warren Buffett that I constantly think of when days or weeks are red like this. “The Stock Market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
Hold, don’t sell. Give it a while. Give it a year. Don’t look every day if it makes you squeamish, because if you sell, you are missing out on what could be. Those prices could correct, those stock values could go higher, something might happen to an industry or sector that allows those stocks to soar. When the markets are red, lots of stocks and ETFs are also red, you are not the only one.
I am writing this out, not just for you, but for myself. I look at the numbers every day and when I am in despair, my wife tells me, “Just sit on them, you know this.” It comforts me to hear her say this and gets me right back into the game.
So if you’ve only been holding for a few days, weeks, or months, give it the year. See where it takes that stock. If you are getting good at waiting, give it more than a year if it needs it.
Thrifty Investing 