Should I Really Be Buying Stocks (or Bonds) Now?

A reader writes in, asking:

“Lately I’ve seen expert after expert saying that a big stock market correction is coming because of Greece and a bond correction is coming because of rising interest rates. My question is whether it still makes sense to be investing money. If stocks and bonds are going to be less expensive in the near future, shouldn’t I just wait?”

Personally, I place no value in expert opinions about where the market is going.

For example, with regard to bonds, people have been predicting the bursting of a “bond bubble” for almost five years now. In August of 2010, Jeremy Siegel and Jeremy Schwartz wrote the following in an article for The Wall Street Journal:

“Ten years ago we experienced the biggest bubble in U.S. stock market history. […] A similar bubble is expanding today that may have far more serious consequences for investors. It is in bonds, particularly U.S. Treasury bonds. Investors, disenchanted with the stock market, have been pouring money into bond funds, and Treasury bonds have been among their favorites.”

Near the end of the article they concluded that, “those who are now crowding into bonds and bond funds are courting disaster.”

And yet, over the last five years, Vanguard’s Intermediate-Term Treasury Fund has earned an annualized return of just over 3%. That’s not exactly off the charts, but it’s hardly a “disaster.” And it’s definitely not the sort of thing I think of when I imagine a financial bubble bursting. (In other words, it’s exactly the sort of ho-hum return one would typically expect from Treasury bonds.)

By keeping your money in cash in order to avoid a “bond bubble,” you miss out on interest that you could have earned in the meantime. And the longer you end up waiting for the correction, the more interest you forgo.

And with regard to stocks, high profile experts are similarly unreliable. For example, think back to December of 1996. As of that point in time, the stock market (as measured by the S&P 500) had quadrupled in value over the last 10 years. And, on December 5, 1996, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (i.e., the person then regarded as both knowing more about the economy and having more power over the economy than anybody else) gave a speech in which he publicly suggested that stock prices might be “unduly escalated” due to “irrational exuberance.”

That’s as clear of a get-out-of-the-market signal as anybody can hope for. And yet, if you took your money out of the market immediately after hearing that speech, you missed the 112% (!) increase in value that occurred from December 1996 to March 2000.

In short, knowing that a market decline is coming isn’t especially useful unless you know when it is coming — and even the experts get that wrong on a regular basis.