Market Meltdown Survival Guide

Markets all over the world seem to be tumbling and the media is in a frenzy. I know my portfolio sure has taken a beaten (the equities portion at least). I’m not going to be doing anything differently. My focus is entirely on my asset allocation and sticking to it. No selling, and buying as soon as I have enough cash build-up from monthly contributions to buy an ETF while keeping the commission at <1% of the purchased amount. You might be considering buying now as the market might flatten out and rebound upwards; but it might instead go down further. You might be thinking about waiting on the side lines for a while until we really hit bottom; but it might rebound sooner than you think and you will miss out on all those gains. Do not succumb to this kind of thinking. Remember that every day the market will do something fairly random that you cannot predict. Just make regular consistent contributions and purchases and you will end up buying at random prices and everything will even out. Or, in general, if you are investing for the long term do not change your investing behaviour based on what the market is doing day-to-day or month-to-month. Hopefully your investing strategy over the past year was such that nothing about your strategy will change now that market is correcting. Ok, so this isn't really a guide; but there isn't really much to it. You don't really need to do anything because if you are investing properly for the long term a market meltdown is a non-event.