Are stocks a bargain?
Market gurus disagree on the wisdom of buying now
“Some of the country’s most famous investors, including Warren Buffett and John Bogle,” say "it’s time to dive back into the stock market,” said David Leonhardt in The New York Times. Their argument is that stocks are a bargain, because the market is being driven by “irrational fears.” But there’s another, under-appreciated argument: that the last 20 years have been “one of the great bubbles in history,” and that stocks could fall another 20-35 percent.
So does that mean you should abandon “buy-and-hold investing”? said Fortune’s Brian O’Keefe in CNNMoney. Not at all. The point of dollar-cost-average investing is to keep putting money in during good times and bad, as well as rebalancing your portfolio. That said, stocks do look cheap, as do some commodities and other asset classes here and abroad.
What you do with your investments now “depends more on personal circumstances than on market condition,” said Chuck Jaffe in MarketWatch. And there is no easy answer to, as the Clash asks, “should I stay or should I go?” The only constant is that you need to diversify your investments.
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And the good news there, said Brett Arends in The Wall Street Journal, is that since “everything has fallen, across the board,” everything is affordable. You now get to “re-do your portfolio,” and that probably means buying more foreign equities—many of which are “much better bargains than Wall Street”—bonds, and even gold.
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