I just received an email from 7IM about today’s markets.
They write; Clients need only to read the news to worry about their investments right now. It’s no leap at all to consider whether a move to cash is a good move. In the context of long term returns, there is a simple answer to that – it isn’t.
Looking back at the worst market conditions in recent memory, we’ve turned to an old favourite to illustrate this…
A 7IM Balanced holding worth £100k on 19th May 2008, the day the FTSE began its descent that year, is now worth around £156k. However, with a year spent in cash from 1st March 2009, the market low, it would be worth only £126k today. That’s a whopping 56% vs 26% return. Those dates were the worst you could’ve picked but if you’d have been a bit luckier and timed your exit earlier to avoid more downside, i.e. cashing out on 1st October 2008 for one year, you’d experience a 43% return vs 56% had you stayed invested.
Almost every scenario we’ve run ends in a lower return when investments were substituted for cash around the financial crisis. Only if you’d timed it perfectly, into cash at the top and back in at the bottom, did it work. The brightest minds in our industry didn’t call that.
It’s time in the market, not timing the market that pays.
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying for years!