They say a picture is worth a thousand words…what does the above picture say to you?

To me, it says if you plan on trying to time the market, you better have a pretty fast trigger finger because of the proximity of the “Best” and “Worst” trading days. Stated another way, a lot of those little green spikes are pretty darn close in time to those little gold spikes. Additionally, you are going to need to be a pretty good prognosticator of future market returns because many of the “Best” trading days occurred in years with negative returns and even more of the “Worst” trading days occurred in years with positive returns. Are your contrarian instincts always right?

Mine aren’t, so that is why I try to keep things simple. Since I can no more control (or predict) market returns than the next individual, I try to control the things we can control as investors. For example, we can control the following things (and should):

1. We can control our asset allocation (and should at least annually);

2. We can control our costs (and should do so by using low-cost index-type funds for our core portfolio); and

3. We should diversify our investment assets to include both domestic and international holdings.

If you have questions about your retirement plan or your investment portfolio in these volatile market times, please feel free to contact Intelligent Investing at www.mynmfp.com/new-clients for a no-obligation consultation.

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