Investing in an Unstable World

There's always something going on somewhere around the world causing investors a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety.

It's how you respond to it that matters or should you and do you? Most of it is all noise and should just be ignored when it comes to investing in the stock market.

If you are mostly an income investor like myself, all that matters is growing that yearly cash flow and keeping up with inflation. All those other world events are meaningless to your investment portfolio.

Recession Fears

If you are a student of the nightly dribble spewed out by BNN then you worry a lot. Turn it off and relax. That shit will just put you in a cold sweat and make you do something stupid and sell good companies you own. One day a recession is imminent and the next all bets are off.

Remember why you bought them and what for.

Here's a more recent example to just ignore day to day stock market news.

In December 2018 the S&P 500 recorded their worst performance since 1931 and plunged 20% on Christmas Eve. Did you panic like a Leaf fan and decide to get out and sell everything because the sky is falling?

Too bad if you did because on December 26th, the very next session the Dow jumped up 1,000 points. It's biggest one day point gain in history.

The Toronto market is up 19% since the beginning of 2019 after financial gurus recommend you go to cash. Hmmmm!

You would have missed it had you bailed.

Trade wars, recession fears, interest rates, Hong Kong, North Korea, election fever and on and on it goes. Try to tune it all out and go work on your exercise plan. That is time better spent than in front of the TV shaking about Brexit, Wexit, Putin or China.

Markets go up 70% of the time so hang in there, always!

Investors embrace fear much to easily and are talked out of their strategy just as easy. If this is you maybe hand your money over to a professional because you're too emotional.

Of course the markets will go down, people will borrow more money than they can afford to pay back and there will always be volatility in financial markets. It's what you do about it that matters.

Stay out of the bank and don't move everything to cash and don't buy crypto or weed stocks, then you should be fine.

It's NOT different this time.

Stay invested and for me it's equities and dividend paying growth stocks.

Just because markets are high is NO reason to sell.

Don't buy GICs, savings accounts (HISA), bonds, prefered shares, funds or ETFs.

...and

for the love of god don't by seg funds and their life sucking high management fees. 

Only sell anything if you need the money. If you don't, enjoy the cash flow and stick around for the long term and just ride out the ups and downs. 

That's investing!