The Importance Of Your Time Horizon

Photo Credit: Dr. Wendy Longo || This horizon is distant…

I ran across two interesting articles today:

Both articles are exercises in understanding the time horizon over which you invest.  If you are older, you may not have the time to recover from market shortfalls, so advice to buy dips may sound hollow when you are nearer to drawing on your assets.

Thus the idea that volatility, presumably negative, doesn’t hurt unless you sell.  Some people don’t have much choice in the matter.  They have retired, and they have a lump sum of money that they are managing for long-term income.  No more money is going in, money is only going out.  What can you do?

You have to plan before volatility strikes.  My equity-only clients had 14% cash before the recent volatility hit.  Over the past week I opportunistically brought that down to 10% in names that I would like to own even if the “crisis” deepened.  That flexibility was built into my management.  (If the market recovers enough, I will rebuild the buffer.  Around 1300 on the S&P, I would put all cash to work, and move to the alternative portfolio management strategy where I sell the most marginal ideas one at a time to raise cash and reinvest into the best ideas.)

If an older investor would be hurt by a drawdown in the stock market, he needs to invest less in stocks now, even if that means having a lower income on average over the longer-term.  With a higher level of bonds in the portfolio, he could more than proportionately draw down on bonds during a crisis, which would rebalance his portfolio.  If and when the stock market recovered, for a time, he could draw on has stock positions more than proportionately then.  That also would rebalance the portfolio.