LogFAQs > #948647195

Nanis23 posted...

I know
This is hopeless

I know the feeling. Not from trading stocks, but from other contexts. You can't trade well because you are paralyzed with fear. It affects your decisionmaking, and affects it badly. Fortunately, you haven't actually lost money, being at breakeven. Since it's very hard to overcome fear, I think the easy way out is to let someone else manage the money.

So, if I were you I'd take out enough cash to feel comfortable that you will have no short-term financial difficulties, then wait for the next dip in the market, and when that happens split the remaining funds between SPY, QQQ, ARKK, and BRKB. This gives you two passive index funds, and two actively managed funds (Berkshire is basically a fund) with very different strategies and a history of success. Then do not sell unless something substantive has changed to make one of these investments no longer good. A decline in value of even 50% is not a reason to sell by itself. Buying more when you can add more money is fine, but don't sell.

If one of the 4 outperforms the others significantly, sell some of that one and buy the other ones until you are back to close to balance. One big reason for rebalancing like this is to avoid making the overall portfolio risky enough to make you fearful. Because if you have an outsize amount in one thing (say if ARKK replicated this year and ended up at 50% of the portfolio instead of 25%), it's easier to feel fear if you see big daily losses.

If you get to the point where you don't feel paralyzing fear when thinking about stocks, you can think about going back to actively managing trading yourself and if that's something you want to do.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
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