Posted by Ralph Sklar @ 12:00pm on March 8, 2016
Many of us want to be long term, patient investors. The newspapers have always made that hard, and the internet is making it nearly impossible. The job of the media is to increase their viewership. People are often focused on the short term because the media creates a sense of urgency by exaggerating the news and publishing forecasts regardless of the track record of the forecaster. This free advice is not always trustworthy, so it can be tremendously costly to long term investors.
Before you sell your investments in response to a blizzard of negative headlines, keep in mind that once you sell, you are no longer a long term investor. You become a market timer and a speculator. It is better to have a process and to work it. When looking at a short period of time, doing the wrong thing can look right while doing the right thing can look wrong. In order for long term investments to work, you have to stick with the process.