When the S&P 500 loses money over a 10-year timeframe, it's time to question old assumptions. A long-time advocate of buy-and-hold investing, The Motley Fool's Tom Gardner recently wrote:
The Motley Fool has been associated with long-term, buy-and-hold investing since our founding in 1993. And as co-founder and CEO, I'm writing to say that, for many people, long-term investing simply doesn't work. You read that right. Many investors today are wrong to anchor their stocks to an average holding period of three to five years or more.
from "Long-Term Investing Doesn't Work" June 5, 2009
And over at the Wall Street Journal, these two items describe the changes shaping the investor world:
The ups and downs of the market are prompting more retail investors to abandon buy-and-hold strategies in favor of opportunistic trading.
"The problem I have with the buy-and-hold strategy is that it's a bull-market strategy," says Matthew Tuttle, a financial advisor in Stamford, Connecticut. "In the bust, you give all your profits back."
from "More Investors Say Bye-Bye to Buy-and-Hold" April 8, 2009
Buffeted by steep declines in stocks, many bonds, commodities and real estate, many advisers are questioning their faith in long-standing investment principles.
Two prominent networks of financial advisors--the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors and the Financial Planning Association--are sponsoring panels at conferences this year on the subject of rethinking conventional approaches to investing and building client portfolios.
"There's a seismic change in the market," says Will Hepburn, president of the National Association of Active Investment Managers. "The people who were buy-and-hold-oriented lost a lot of money, and they don't want to do it again."
from "Advisers Ditch 'Buy and Hold' For New Tactics" April 29, 2009
