King Log and market volatility

[kendallf]

I'm basically King Log with my investments; I have few choices for the majority of my money (TSP) and I am fine with it.  A few days ago though I was eyeing my balances and thinking, I'm not going to switch anything up but it's not particularly cheering me up to lose $30k in just a couple of weeks. 

I have read that in an average year, the majority of gains come in just a few days.  The past week bears that out.. I've recouped more than half of the losses since the September peak. 

I have no idea what the market will do tomorrow; it might drop another 20%.  But it might gain back 10%, too.  I'm going to go work on some cabinets and not worry about it.

[PathtoFIRE]

Amen. My wife has the TSP, and in the lifecycle 2040 to boot, and I have been tempted every now and then to fiddle, but then I come to my senses and realize that there's nothing to do (except I will switch it over to the 2050 once the bond % gets too high, but since the future allocations for the TSP lifecycle plans are available online, I can see that this will be several years away still). I even convinced her to role her IRA into it. I'm tempted to get a fedgov job so that I can do the same with my 401k/IRA before fully FIREing.

[DoubleDown]

Same here, I've left everything alone (nor did I "buy on the dip"). I fiddled with my allocations a little bit back in 2012 once, when stupid F*ing Congress was playing chicken over the federal budget and debt ceiling, threatening default. The markets were set to go crazy, so I moved towards a more conservative allocation, then moved it back after the nonsense was over a few weeks later. In the end, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up basically the same either way, whether I had left it alone or moved money around as I did.

I've also largely adopted the theory of "Once you've won the game, quit playing." Once I accumulated enough, I moved to a safer stock/bonds allocation I'm comfortable with (about 60/40). As a result, my balances didn't move down that much with the recent market swings so I don't really have to sweat it out anyhow.

[kendallf]

Same here, I've left everything alone (nor did I "buy on the dip"). I fiddled with my allocations a little bit back in 2012 once, when stupid F*ing Congress was playing chicken over the federal budget and debt ceiling, threatening default.

I actually dropped my TSP contributions down to 5% for a few months during that mess; didn't end up affecting us much but I didn't like the uncertainty.  We had people at work talking about getting their cars repo'd if they had to take a few weeks off..  sigh.

[DoubleDown]

This thread proves that we're all very boring :-)

Too bad I'm not single again and could wow my next first date with a discussion of market timing vs. index investing. Then just wait for her to tear my clothes off.