On Feb 21, 2:13*pm, gregz wrote:
Kurt Ullman wrote:
In article ,
*Notat Home wrote:

Many people think this, *but the facts are, even given an occasional
dive, stocks return more than iou's from congress. *In a dive, you are
only hurt if you bail out. *If you hold onto your stocks, they recover.

* If you stay in the stock market. I never have believed in buy in hold,
rather buy and follow and sell when the reasons you bought in the first
place change. *Just a slight nit to pick (g).

Funds are a little easier to work than individual stocks. Long term
investors usually hold on to good company stocks. If your playing around
your mostly short term. *Right now I'm conservative because the market
probably will not got up much over the year, and more likely to go down.
Just because I'm in retirement does not mean I should be so conservative in
the next years.

Greg

Mutual Funds are fine for the bond and REIT side of a portfolio, but
Separated Managed Accounts (SMA's) are often the better deal for the
traditional equity side.

You get the advantage of owning your own shares of the stocks but you
leave the trading to professional money managers, be that an
individual advisor or a firm which is typically dedicated to a
specific asset class.

In a SMA, you are not subject to the whims of other investors like you
are in a Mutual Fund. The manager trades each account in the same way
based on his model, but if other investors decide to liquidate in a
panic, your account is unaffected since you own your own shares of the
individual equites. You can also do tax harvesting in an SMA,
something you can't do it a Mutual Fund. That's not applicable to an
IRA, but it works well for non-qualified accounts.

Of course, it takes more assets to get into a SMA, usually $100K
minimum per SMA as opposed to next to nothing to get into a Mutual
Fund. To have a well diversified portfolio using SMA's, you have to
have enough assets to spread around amongst the various equity asset
classes.