Investment guru Jack Bogle warns savvy investors that the seemingly endless current volatile stock market isn’t a safe place right now for anyone.
The founder of the Vanguard Group explains that index fund investors buying the dips in the stock market, expanding the valuations on growth stocks and helping push the S&P 500 higher isn’t reliable any longer.
“Trees don’t grow to the sky, and I see clouds on the horizon. I don’t know if and when they’ll arrive. A little extra caution should be the watchword,” he recently told Barron’s. Bogle explained that such “clouds” include large amounts of sovereign and corporate debt, the “great upheaval” in global trade, and “the mystery of Brexit, which will be very disruptive to the world trade system. Those things add up,” he said.
“It’s time to really be thinking how much risk you want to have,” he warned.
“If you were comfortable at a 70% to 30% [allocation to stocks and fixed income], under these circumstances you’d like to go back to 60% to 40% or something like that,” to provide more flexibility, he said.
“If I had a big liability in a year, I’d get prepared for it right now,” says Bogle. “You want to be able to fund it without pressure.” But for a long-term goal, such as retirement? “Keep investing, no matter how frightened you are.”
As fund company executives, portfolio managers and strategists at some of the world’s biggest money managers turn to 2019, they’re cautioning that returns could be muted across asset classes. They’re also urging investors to be increasingly selective in the quest for value, Bloomberg reported.
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