Will you be Late for the Party?
Imagine someone sent you an invitation to a party. It was a party you could not afford to miss. You received the invitation in the mail, yet it had no date on it, no one to contact, just the place where it was being held. You would have three options:
1) Arrive Early: head to the location immediately and wait to make sure you’d be there when the party started
2) Guess: You could estimate what day the party was and show up when you thought it would start, but risk missing the party.
3) Skip It: You could choose not to go to the party.

What a Year and It’s Still Not Over!
2008 has been a horrible year for investors. Make no mistake about it; we saw the collapse of the housing market, a wide-spread global credit crisis, major corporate bankruptcies, and government interventions. We also watched as energy prices hit record highs to then drop like a brick. We also saw rising food prices, a historical US election, and a $700 billion rescue package in an attempt to necessitate the failing U.S. economy. And the year is not over yet!

The year 2008 is a year many of us would like to forget. As 2008 closes out, what do we have to look forward to in 2009? More of the same? Or will the tides finally change? No one knows for sure. People like Jim Cramer will tell you the next five years is no time to be in the market. I keep hearing, “the sky keeps falling, “the world’s going to end”, “this will never come back”. The pundits and doomsayers keep selling the bad news and many of us are caving in. You may want to sell your stocks, lock-in your losses, and move on to more stable investments. This is precisely the wrong course of action!

The Party Will Be Here Before You Know It!
Staying invested ensures that you will be at the rally party – the point when the market recovers. No one knows when this will occur, but it will happen. It’s better to be early than to not arrive at all. For many, you have lost so much that you cannot afford to miss the party. Do you realize that if you have lost 40% of your investment value in your portfolio, if you move to a CD at 2%, it would take over 25 years to recover?

During down times, you need to be willing to tighten your budget, set aside more savings, and keep putting new money to work in the market. Many great companies are being treated like they have the bubonic plague. Even better, there is a select group of companies picking up market share, streamlining their businesses, and putting themselves in great positions to earn super-sized profits down the line. Will you reap the reward? Not if you get out and miss the party!

If we can just be patient as the economy sorts itself out, we will see our country can recover. The Great Depression eventually ended, the savings and loan crisis came to a halt, and life went on after the technology blow-up in the early 2000s, and the world carried on after Sept. 11th. While each of those events generated significant panic, what each event had in common was they presented a very good time to buy stocks.  Don’t miss the party!  RSVP Today!