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Successful investing is about getting into good habits. That doesn’t mean just knowing the theory - it doesn’t matter how well read you are, or whether you have a 1st in Economics. Success means actually doing it - having a plan, based on best practice, and then applying it - day after day, month after month, year after year.
One typically overlooked part of this plan is risk management. That sounds fancy, but at its core it has one simple element, a Stop-Loss.
Do you want to risk losing a substantial chunk of your life savings? Of course not.
Do you have a plan to stop this happening? Most investors don’t.
That is a HUGE error, particularly in years when the vulnerability of financial markets is extreme. 2024 is one of those years*.
The solution is having a Stop-Loss, which is simply a way to stop your loss getting any bigger. It is not you or I predicting where the market will go next. It is all about protecting your valuable capital, in particular the risk of intolerably large, and prolonged, losses. The sort of losses that can ruin your life plans… and which are difficult to explain to your family, who will question why you did nothing as losses mounted.
In this blog you can see how applying a Stop-Loss can actually improve the growth of your investments.
You can easily factor into your thinking occasional years of market weakness.
But every few years, perhaps once every few decades, it can get somewhat worse. If this happens at a crucial point in your life it can devastate your life plans. My concern is that, on a variety of measures, the risks in financial markets today are more extreme than at any other point in the last 40 years.
If our parents or grandparents had invested early in the last century, could they really have guessed that their lives would be consumed by two World Wars, the Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression? Sometimes fate is just going to deal you a tough hand.
We have created a unique automated solution, and this is now available to you free of charge – with my compliments. You will find that tool here. In addition, in “Stop-Losses And Momentum Investing Don’t Work” we look at the evidence – that’s not a strong point for my industry!
* 2024 one of those years? Have a look at this November teleconference for some thoughts on that, plus a positive opportunity which is currently unfolding. Remember, this teleconference, and all prior teleconferences, research and blogs, are now available to you free of charge. Enjoy.