填空题 For Investors wondering whether they should dump their stocks because they need the money, I have only this to say. if you need the money today, you should have sold years ago.
1
For some people, drops as steep as we"ve seen in Asian markets in recent months are too much to take physically. I"m a big believer in the sleep-at-night theory. No Investment is worth keeping if it robs you of your sleep. If you can"t stomach 50 per cent losses in your stock portfolio, get out now and save yourself a heart attack. You may not buy that mansion in Spain, but you"ll live to see your granddaughter"s graduation.
2
If you own stock in a company, but don"t know what it actually does to make a profit, you deserve to take a bath if the share price plunges.
If your company doesn"t make money and has no reasonable prospect of doing so soon, sell. Buying things that have no intrinsic value is fun with, say, baseball cards. But this is real money we"re talking about. Earnings and dividends paid out to stockholders are the only things that can tell you in the long term whether owning a stock is worthwhile.
3
Avoid sector and country funds. You will never lead the pack if you invest in global stock or bond funds, but you"ll never finish last, either. As a dabbler at investing, how are you supposed to know whether now is a good time to buy a technology fund but a bad time to sell one investing in Thailand? Those decisions are best left to people who are paid to think about such things all day.
4
Most importantly, if you need the money in the next three to four years, look into buying bonds, either individually or through a mutual fund. Stocks in good businesses that are well run will eventually rise and outperform bonds, but maybe not as fast as you might need them to.
Even if you plunge into the stock market without being precisely sure why, its never too late to think about your holdings. Remember, the worst stocks not only keep falling but can approach zero.
5
A. For mutual-fund holders, the situation is a little different. You don"t need to know what the companies in your fund do. But there are a couple of rules to live by.
B. The biggest losers are those who refuse to jump off what is clearly a sinking ship. They predict the proud, valiant deaths, but they"re dead in the water all the same.
C. Every week insurance companies receive premium payments customers. These payments can form a very large total running into millions of dollars. The company does not leave the money in the bank. It invests in property, shares, farms and even antique paintings and stamps. Its aim is to obtain the best possible return on its investment.
D. Even if you sleep soundly, the prospect of a potentially prolonged bear market begs the most basic investment question: why do you own the stocks that you do? Now, more than at any other time in the past ten years, a few simple rules of investing apply:
E. That advice holds whether the market is up or down. Even though a lot of novice investors claim they are in stocks "for the long haul", that often turns out to be nonsense. It is easy to be brave and keep buying during a bull market. But what if we"re in for mediocre stocks market gains for the next 10 years?
F. Don"t pay obscene fees. Unless a fund under the same manager has consistently outperformed its peers for five years, there is no reason to pay expenses of more than two per cent a year, or a front-end load of more than two to three per cent, anything more goes into nice vacations for your manager and posh leather sofas in his waiting room.