It cannot be more scary than this: the Dow tumbled 335 points, the much broader S&P 500 got shellacked 41 points, and the tech-laden Nasdaq lost 90 points, and all occurred on the same day last week! This was a worst day of stocks which we hadn't seen for at least over 2 years. The plunge has erased the whole gain of the stock market in this year. If you feel shattered, frustrated or depressed, I can understand. So should you consider to run? Yes and No!
If you have many risky stocks in your portfolio that you are only speculating for short-term trading profits, then definitely you should be worried. Such kind of stocks are usually the first ones to crash and the last ones to recover, if they even can recover. You should always have some exit strategy to run quickly if the trend starts to turn against you.
On the other hands, if you have a portfolio with high quality dividend paying stocks, you should feel lucky that their stock prices are declining. You can benefit in 2 ways: 1) you can sleep very well at night knowing that your next dividends from such stocks will buy you more shares. This in the long run will bring you much more wealth than from the stock price appreciation. Don't believe it? See here. 2) You can buy more of such great stocks with lower prices to increase your positions.
One thing I still believe in is that this is the bull market and nothing fundamentally has changed to justify a reversal of this big trend. To me this is just a needed breath and rest for the market during its bull run. Therefore this plunge should be short-lived and I think it has created a great trading opportunity at moment. I think the oil market is specially interesting as it has been beaten down so badly that a strong rebound is very likely with any slight better or even no-so-bad news. USO is one way to bet for the oil market. I'm also expecting to see some general bouncing back from the overall market very soon. SSO is an effective way to do so.
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