STAY CALM?

If your financial advisor's strategy for navigating bear markets involves watching your portfolio's value evaporate by 20%+ and insisting that you "stay calm", you need a new advisor.

You can choose to follow your advisor's "stay calm" mantra and allow the market to run it's course, because it will eventually come back - as they have undoubtedly reminded you - it always does. But what they will not tell you is that this will cost you something even more precious than the hard-earned money you've already lost- TIME. After the bear market of 2000 "staying calm" cost investors 13 years. Thirteen years! It doesn't take a mathematician to understand that avoiding the blood-baths of 2000, 2008 and the impending 2022 is practically the difference between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in retirement saving.

Nobody has a crystal ball... TRUE- but you don't need to be a psychic to avoid the carnage that has visited the market three times in the last 21 years. Any independent technical analyst worth their salt has the tools available to steer you clear of these major pit falls with few false positives.

If it's really this simple, why don't more people avoid these losses? This is a great question that needs it's own separate article, but the bottom line is that A LOT of money did exit the market (not by luck) and many advisors without exit strategies are telling their clients to "stay calm". Is "staying calm" really the strategy that you want to have for navigating bear markets?