Finding Your Balance in a Topsy-Turvy Market

Image Credit: Alex Nabaum

The market wisdom that sounds the easiest can be the hardest to follow.

Take “buy low, sell high.”

Buying low and selling high is logically sound but emotionally harrowing. That’s because it requires buying something that feels risky because it just went down, while selling something that feels safer because it has just gone up. That counterintuitive step is what investment professionals call rebalancing: moving against the market’s recent direction to adjust your mix of stocks, bonds and other assets back to predetermined targets.

 

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This article was originally published on The Wall Street Journal.

Further reading

Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor