EBRI's Annual Retirement Confidence Survey

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI):

"Workers who say they are very confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement this year hit the lowest level in 2009 (13 percent) since the Retirement Confidence Survey started asking the question in 1993, continuing a two-year decline. Retirees also posted a new low in confidence about having a financially secure retirement, with only 20 percent now saying they are very confident (down from 41 percent in 2007)."

EBRI also says less than half of those surveyed have any idea how much money they will need to retire comfortably:

"Many workers still do not have a good idea of how much they need to save for retirement.  Only 44 percent of workers report they and/or their spouse have tried to calculate how much money they will need to have saved by the time they retire—and an equal proportion (44 percent) simply guess at how much they will need for a comfortable retirement."

Unfortunately, an astounding 53% have less than $25,000 in savings and investment. Fully 76% of those responding to the survey reported having less than $100,000 put away for retirement.  So, regardless of how much they think they need, few respondents have much at all put aside for retirement.

There has never been a more urgent need for successful investing to rebuild the account values ravaged by last year's market decline.

Read the entire report at 

http://www.ebri.org/pdf/briefspdf/EBRI_IB_4-2009_RCS1.pdf

Trade the Trend

Very powerful training session this morning. One point that hit home is we must trade with the trend. Fighting the trend is like swimming upstream in a swift river.

The question all investors need to answer for themselves is this: Which trend do I want to follow? Short-, intermediate- or long-term trend?

Steve showed us how to use the 5-day moving average and the price channel as stops in the current intermediate trend, and how the 5-day gives us a great exit point during the initial phase of this intermediate advance. The price channel will give us more lattitude when the short-term cycle chop begins.