The easiest thing to do now, when thinking about my share portfolios, is to panic.
But there is no point in taking this course. It is almost certain that the fall in share prices which we see at the moment, on account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will only be seen as a correction or blip in a year’s time, or two years or five years.
And that is how you should view your shares investments. If you are going to be thrown about and discommoded when shares rise or fall in the short term, you are in the wrong investment class.
It can be difficult when you are in the moment and see shares dropping by 10 plus % in a day or a week. A lot of that gain may have been hard earned and painfully slow to acquire and observe.
But if you can imagine yourself looking back in 2027 at the stock market falls we see now I firmly believe the corrections will be seen as temporary and short lived in the context of an investment strategy that has 5 years as a reasonable time over which to judge results.
I probably won’t check my portfolios for a few weeks. There is no point as there is nothing I can, or will, do about any drops in prices.
And remember, the companies in which I have invested continue to trade and sell their goods and services to their existing customers and seek to gain new ones.