5 mistakes to avoid in a bear market

The attack on your stock holdings has come quickly, but it’s never too late to dust off your bear market survival kit to be prepared as the market continues to poke the bear. Surviving a steep stock market slide is often more about riding out the storm than running away from trouble.

The stock market been extremely volatile this year. It has come perilously close many times, including Friday, to closing in bear market territory but has so far always managed to stave it off at the last moment.

The broad market Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped about 18.5%, shy of the 20% decline to mark an official bear market and less than the 40% dip suffered in bears since 1929, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Still, the market decline is unsettling. The good news? You can survive this and even a bear market if one materializes – if you stick to the basic survival guide that Wall Street periodically pulls from the bookcase when the bear initiates its attack on your money.

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What follows is a bear market survival guide that highlights major mistakes to avoid:

Don’t think you know where the low is

Where’s the bottom? That catchphrase is as popular on Wall Street as Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ad was during the burger wars in the ’80s.

There’s just one problem: it’s nearly impossible to call a market low, says Jerry Braakman, chief investment officer of First American Trust.

“One of the biggest money mistakes that investors make in a bear market is thinking they can pick the bottom,” Braakman says.

Bear markets, he points out, are not quick events. (They typically last 21 months, S&P Dow Jones Indices says.)

Bears have frighteningly high volatility. (Just between Wednesday and Friday, the CBOE VIX index measuring S&P 500 volatility jumped almost 5 points to more than 28%, sharply higher than the 30-day rolling average of 15.5% since the 1920s.) )

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It’s not uncommon for big rallies to occur in bear markets before reaching a final low. (The market saw several 20% rebounds during the dot-com stock bear in 2000 and the financial crisis in 2008, Braakman points out. Since late May’s bottom, the S&P 500 has climbed approximately 6.0% before Friday’s plunge. That may have provided hope for investors that the worst was behind us, but as we can see now, “hope is not a strategy,” John Lynch, chief investment officer at Comerica, said.)

Bottoms often take months to form, Braakman says. It’s not uncommon for the S&P 500 to rally before going back down to “test” the old lows. Often, new lower lows are made.

In the current economic situation of surging inflation and a Federal Reserve committed to containing it , picking a bottom will again be extremely difficult.

“Anyone who can tell with certainty how this all reconciles is a charlatan,” Braakman says. “With high volatility, mistakes can be amplified. You should stay disciplined with your long-term asset allocation.

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Don’t panic and cash out

Sure, cash is safe, and stocks are risky in a bear market. But that doesn’t mean cash is the answer to all your financial problems – especially if you’re saving for retirement that’s decades away.

“Another big mistake that investors make in a bear market is moving to cash,” Braakman says.

No doubt, cash minimizes paper losses when stocks are in free fall. But stocks don’t stay down forever. Like New York’s lotto slogan says, “You’ve gotta be in it to win it.” (We’re not equating investing with gambling, but it’s true that you can’t participate in a market rebound if your money isn’t invested.)

“You never know,” Braakman warns, ”the recovery could potentially be quick.”

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The problem is most people who get out of the market won’t get back in at the right time, Braakman says.

“In earlier bear markets, it took years for investors who moved to cash to come back, so they missed much of the rebound after selling on the way down,” Braakman said. “The lesson is to stay disciplined in your long-term plan.

Don’t get carried away with risky assets

Reaching for the biggest gains and investing only in the riskiest stuff is a recipe for disaster.

You must “build some protection into your portfolio,” advises Kelly LaVigne, VP of consumer insights for Allianz Life. Too often, he says, when people are “chasing” returns they forget about the lessons they’ve learned about managing risk.

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LaVigne says, “If bear markets teach us anything, it’s that a good retirement portfolio – particularly for those within 10 years of retirement – needs to have a balance of accumulation and protection, to help ensure all those funds you spent time building don’t disappear the next time a black swan event occurs.”

Don’t be too aggressive

That can prove costly, says David Reyes, financial adviser at Reyes Financial Architecture.

“The average investor’s portfolio is way too aggressive for their needs and for their ability to psychologically take on the risks of bear markets,” Reyes says. People end up losing more money than they can afford to lose, even some with a balanced portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds, he says.

Another mistake is not paring back risk as you age and near retirement, says Jeff Soltow, financial planner at Frontier Wealth Management.

“(Many) investors will end up taking too much risk later in life and will suffer losses they won’t recover from,” Soltow says. “This sometimes forces them to continue working or they end up falling short in savings.”

Don’t try to time the market

Getting out at “the” market top and getting back in at “the” market bottom is hard to do. No, it’s pretty much impossible to get the timing exactly right. Don’t even try, says Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at the Independent Advisor Alliance.

“The worst thing investors can do during a bear market is try to time the market,” Zaccarelli says. “It is much more difficult than they realize.”

If you’re truly a long-term investor, stay the course and reap the gains the stock market has historically delivered over time to patient investors, he says.

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You’re better off “staying invested than by gambling that (you) will be able to outsmart all of the other investors in the world through (your) unique ability to time things well on both when to sell and when to buy back,” Zaccarelli says.

Nobody can predict when stocks will stop going down and start to climb again, he says. The rebound off the bear market low in 2009 is a good example, he says.

“If people … were honest with themselves, they would remember that 3/9/09 felt as terrible as 2/9/09, 1/9/09, 12/9/08, 11/9/08,” Zaccarelli says. “Little did they know that from the bottom in 2009 that by 3/31/09, the market would be up 18%; by 6/30/09, the market would be up 36%; and by 12/31/09, it would be up by 65%.”

One more thing: Do have patience, LaVigne says, and do prepare now for the next bear attack.

“Much of the financial planning advice you’ll see at the beginning of a bear market revolves around having patience,” LaVigne says. “And with good reason, because for those that suffered significant losses in their portfolio, time will be their greatest ally. Do everything you can to avoid letting the next one – and there will be a next one – decimate your savings. The best way to do that is to build some protection into your portfolio to help ensure that at a minimum, you have the assets necessary to cover fixed costs in retirement.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lessons for bear markets: stay in, diversify, don’t try to call a low