Topic: How To Invest

Pat: Are there any reasons why an investor might want to hold a cash balance, or should we just stay fully invested?

Article Excerpt

I can think of three reasons why you might want to hold cash at any one time. 1. You can’t sleep at night because you are nervous about the market outlook. In that case you should, as the saying goes, sell down to the sleeping point. 2. You expect you will need to take cash out of your portfolio in the next year or two and you don’t want to risk having to raise cash by selling stocks at low prices. 3. You have some realistic reason to think stock prices will be substantially lower in, say, six months or a year. This is why most people take money out of their portfolio. They often do so at or near a market low. Numbers 1 and 2 are personal decisions. Number 3 is different. At times you will guess right about a coming market downturn, of course. But this urge to “go into cash” (as brokers refer to it) rarely appears at times that…