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Today I sat down to eat lunch (an artichoke and some soup from Whole Foods Market) and write a blog. I enjoy writing blogs so I thought this would be a nice lunchtime activity. What I learned is that you cannot really eat an artichoke and type! So I set aside my laptop (not my food of course!) and read the Investor’s Business Daily while I enjoyed my lunch. It occurred to me that timing is everything! Then I thought about how much this concept applies to most things in life especially investing.
You could choose the best of any investment whether it is a fund a stock or a piece of real estate and if the timing is not right it can turn out to be a lousy investment. Sure sometimes you may have to be patient and wait a few months for the investment to bottom but buying at the very top can be detrimental to a portfolio and could take years to recover.
Spend just a few minutes for a huge lesson. Follow the link below to Bigcharts.com. Go to Advanced Charting from the red tab on the right. Type $INX into the symbol space and choose one decade and weekly from the pull down tab menu in the time frame section. Look how differently your investment results would have been if you had entered the stock market mid 2000 vs. mid 2003. Spend a few minutes looking at this chart for one of the most important lessons in investing: Timing is everything! Look at various points on the chart and think of how differently your investment would have performed had you bought it at different times in the cycles.
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/
$INX is the symbol for the S&P 500 index which represents the overall stock market or broad market in investing terms. This index tends to hold stocks that are more growth oriented than value oriented which is another factor that affects stock performance and creates cycles. That little $ is usually entered when you put in a symbol also called a ticker for an index.
You now know how to create a chart for the stock market. Bigcharts is free and you can do this with any stock or index and many funds. This opens a whole new world to understanding prices and investing cycles. Spend some time here.
If you like this topic send me an email. It is always fun to connect with other women who enjoy investing knowledge wherever they might be on that journey. One thing is for sure there is always more to learn! I’ll have much much more in my upcoming teleseminar in September. Keep an eye out for information on my site over the summer as class size will be limited. Until then stay cool and enjoy some watermelon just don’t type while you are eating it!
Happy Summer!