I am ready to cut my losses and exit the MF portfolio I started a year ago and would appreciate some advice. Many moons ago (25 years) when I was a grad student with a couple of little kids, I did some active trading with a gift from my in-laws and MF was a huge resource and seemed really ethical. My active trading days ended when we got super busy with kids and work and because our retirement money was in 401k’s with only mutual funds as options (used mostly S&P500 index funds). So when my husband left his employer last year, it was an opportunity to explore buying more individual stocks (this was also spurred on by a close, and much younger, friend investing 200k in Tesla and reaching financial freedom by 35). So I checked out how my old resource MF might be able to help me get back into investing with stocks and ended up paying for a premium service. Bad timing, lack of research, and naivete, as well as poor guidance from MF, have resulted in a 15% loss over the past year in our portfolio. I lost 30k in the first month! The almost 200k we are now down, took a lot of work to build so this is hard.
I tried to be a good “buy and hold” investor and stopped checking my balances and then became afraid to even look. I thought I was showing the depth of my commitment to this type of investing. I finally came here to these boards and began learning a bit more and it is clear to me I need to pivot. I want to learn a lot more and stop relying on MF or other newsletters but that is going to take a bit of time so the question is what to do with my current portfolio of stocks. Do I sell them all immediately? Put some Stop-Limit orders in place and sell them off over a period of time? Do I go back to putting money into an S&P500 index for a short period? Having made this huge mistake, I am trying to learn as quickly how to minimize my risk for the next steps. I like investing and will enjoy the learning that is ahead of me but I don’t feel like I can leave my money any longer in these stocks that continue to tank.
We have 15 years to retirement and are still contributing sizable amounts to our retirement funds.
Thanks for any advice!