At least that’s the opinion of John Rekenthaler in this blog post at Morningstar. As long as I continue to see articles like this, I know that the buy-and-holders are still out in force. His argument seems to be that if you were lucky enough to miss the decline, you couldn’t possibly get back into the market when it began to rise again. So he counsels throwing up your hands and just holding on for dear life. When I read this, it seemed to me like a good argument for having an unemotional, systematic process for tactical allocation rather than a good argument for buy and hold.
Buy and Hold is Not Dead
October 14, 2009
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Investor Behavior, Tactical Asset Alloc, Thought Process | 
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Posted by Mike Moody
Oil Stimulus Plan
October 14, 2009Apparently it is not enough that the U.S. and other Western nations import scads of oil at a cost of billions of dollars a year. Saudi Arabia is now proposing that they be paid for any revenues lost while combating global warming. (They say they need the cash in order to diversify their economy. I am kind of wondering what happened to the hundreds of billions they have received in the past fifty years.) This time, they claim it is a make-or-break proposition. Since it is unlikely that importers will be willing to pay both for new clean energy production and the Saudis for lost revenues, if they are serious about this position we could see a lot of volatility in oil prices-maybe even an embargo-while the dispute gets resolved. Other countries are sensing that the U.S. is economically vulnerable right now and are quite willing to push for concessions that they wouldn’t have considered a few years ago. Investment plans will need to incorporate these new uncertainties along with the normal risks of investing.
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Posted by Mike Moody
