Some say buy, some say sell, some say its time we go to hell...
...Who is right, who is wrong, who has got no knickers on..?
The best description of the dog-eat-dog financial adviser/broker world is, that they are just a bunch of talking heads...everybody has an arsehole and likewise, everybody has an opinion.
So, what to do?
You couldn't fly an airliner until such time as you had the training and experience to do so.
Likewise, you can't successfully invest until such time as you have appropriate personal training and experience to do so.
The only person you can trust with your money is yourself...
everyone else is trying to put their hands into your pockets.
Successful investing is a science, an art and a philosophy. An understanding of risk vs reward forms the basis of the science. Acting on that analysis is the art. Philosophy is the part where you grit your teeth, ignore the mindless masses of lemmings jumping off the cliff and maintain your strategy over the long run.
The antithesis of investing is gambling, where the risks are high to extreme or even worse, completely unknown (or not understood) to the punter.
Someone said:
Anyone dumb enough to cash in everything at the "advice" of PPRunE shouldn't even be allowed to manage their own affairs, never mind making decisions that actually affect the safety of others.
This is an interesting observation. Airline pilots have to make critical decision after critical decision from the pre-flight planning stage throughout the entire operation until a safe shutdown at the destination. Even a small error in any of these decisions may lead to a catastrophic accident with commensurate loss of life and property. So we become extremely expert at making the correct decisions and these decisions are thoroughly cross-checked by our crew-members to guarantee a safe outcome.
So how come we are so good at making these critical aircraft operational decisions, and yet at the same time we are seemingly so ill-equipped to make sane investing decisions?
I speculate that there are a number of reasons:
1. A flight is a journey into a rolling continuous decision making process that progresses from decision to decision. Each decision made and executed cannot be undone and the next decision will necessarily take that outcome into account to define the next set of options from which the following decision will be taken and acted upon.
2. The end result of a flight operation involves a time period ranging from say 90 minutes to say, 20 hours.
3. The end of a successful investing operation is years and years and years...
3. At the end of a successful flight operation, all factors and outcomes are RESET to ZERO.
4. In real life investing, at the end of any defined period, all factors and outcomes are NEVER RESET to ZERO.
The difference in risk assessment, decision making and task execution between a successful flight operation and a successful investment operation are therefore poles apart.
You must learn about investing and you must advise yourself on what investments you should make.
Trust nobody but yourself with your own money!