You've probably heard these two phrases before:

 

The 3 most important words in real estate are location, location, and location.

 

The 3 most important words in the stock market are timing, timing, and timing.

 

Do you have a phrase like this for your business and/or career? I do:

 

The 3 most important words for my clients/business/career are process, process, and process.

 

Why do I bring this up now? Because the stock market is eventually going to go into bear market mode and the economy is going to recede. Well, everyone is right when they say "eventually", so I guess that kind of makes me sound like Captain Obvious. But sometimes the most obvious things are the last things we see. Two questions need to be asked:

1. Have investors become immune to negative news? From the FED, politics, trade tariffs, poor emerging market performance this year, Italian debt, strife in the Middle East, North Korea; stocks have been running over hurdles with ease. Strong corporate earnings, massive stock buybacks, and a decently durable economy are the reasons given, which I too certainly accept. But I also know, based on my nearly 30 years of experience in this biz, nothing creates stock market believers more than past performance.
2. Have investors become overly emboldened with regard to their personal risk tolerance? Risk tolerance is a funny thing in and of itself because it changes based on investors' poor perception of how odds work. If you flip a coin a hundred times and it comes up heads 90 times, are your odds of coming up heads 90%? No. It is still 50/50. Long term investing raises your odds of stock market success and short term investing lowers your odds, which is the difference between investing and gambling. Bear markets and corrections have always come with much greater frequency than they have in the last 9 years. If 9 out of the last 10 years we've come up heads, so should it be the perception that we have 90% odds of an up market this year? You can bet on those odds and do just fine if you're wrong - if you're far away from needing to fund your retirement, that is. For those facing retirement in a few years or who are already retired? Not so much. Click HERE to read how sequence of returns could affect your retirement savings

You see, investors are happy right now. But that's no reason to invest outside of one's risk tolerance. Now, I'm not using this post to make a call on the stock market, nor am I one to believe investors should be positioned all in or all out of stocks. However, happiness is an emotion. It's the best one, to be sure, but when it comes to investing, emotions needs to be kept in check. Because when stocks do turn for the worse and stay that way for a long time, you don't want to be unhappy for so long a duration. Why? Because many investors will abandon long term investing for short term relief. They'll sell out, like those who did at the bottom in 2009, only to regain optimism after a long winning stretch, which is when they'll once again abandon their risk tolerance, which perpetually keeps them in the same vicious cycle.

 

The process at ClientFirst Strategy, Inc. is designed to avoid that. It's rebalancing, limit orders, stop orders, anticipating clients' life events, holistic planning, communicating, positioning your account more conservatively as you age, and basically, all of the things that need to be done to keep you invested over the long term - to give you the greatest possible potential to raise your odds of success in investing and in life.

 

There are a lot more things that can interfere with our investing and financial plans than there are things that can keep us committed, which is why having a process is the only thing that stands in between any of us and our total abandonment of our pursuit of happiness many years from now.

 

To schedule a 15 minute, one-on-one introductory phone call with me to learn more about how my investing and financial planning process could help you reach your financial goals, click the "Let's Talk" button and pick a time slot on my calendar:

 

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Thank you for taking the time to read this!

Mitch

I opened ClientFirst Strategy, Inc. because I believe that the only way to help my clients potentially achieve their goals is by offering unbiased advice & investment management expertise. To my clients, thank you for your continued vote of confidence. If you are not a client but would like to explore the possibility of becoming one, I invite you to call me directly, visit my website, join my email list, and/or connect with me on social media.