Panic on Wall Street With Mark Biller

Christian talk radio with Rob West

There's nothing like a crisis to make investors question their long-term strategies. Wall Streets recent correction was the result of panicked investors moving their money to the sidelines. Rob West and Steve Moore talk with investing expert Mark Biller from Sound Mind Investing to get an overview of events and what we should learn from them.Here are some of the takeaways: The market was already up roughly 40% from the lows of December 2018. That's an awfully big run in one direction, so it isn't surprising that we would see a correction. It just happened that the Coronavirus came along and provided a compelling reason for the market to panic.But it's important to recognize that, although it erased about four months worth of gains in a week and a half, that should be viewed in light of a bull market that lasted 11 years. In the bull market of the past decade, we've had five other corrections of between 10-20 percent - in 2010, 2011, 2015-16, and 2018. So February was the sixth correction of this type in the past 11 years - which is almost exactly the historical average of one every 1.5 - 2 years. Our baseline advice is always the same: Everything depends on having a long term investing plan and sticking to it. That's why we always say people need to have at least a 5-year investing horizon if they're going to have money in the stock market. That way, in case of a bear market, stock prices have time to recover before you would need to start taking withdrawals from your portfolio.But because most market corrections DON'T follow through to become bear markets, most investors are better off not trying to react when these scary downturns come along. The upside of corrections and bear markets is they are actually great opportunities for long term investors who are building a nest egg by dollar-cost averaging. Bear markets bring stock prices down to more affordable levels so buyers get more shares for their money. That means during a bear market, your regular, fixed contributions to a 401k or IRA will buy you more shares than they did during the prior bull market. When the bear market eventually ends, and the next bull market gets underway, all those shares you bought cheap will gain in value. The coronavirus and subsequent market downturn didn't catch God by surprise. He remains in firm control of events.