LA Times, July 19, 2002 NEWS ANALYSIS Investors Losing Faith in Buy-and-Hold Mantra By TOM PETRUNO, KATHY M. KRISTOF and JOSH FRIEDMAN, Times Staff Writers
Invest for the long haul. Don't try to play market swings. Keep most of your money in stocks because they'll beat the alternatives over time. These are the rules that millions of individual investors accepted as gospel in the 1990s. But amid the worst stock market decline in a generation, and a severe crisis of confidence in the financial system itself, many investors are no longer sure they believe the old rules. It's a shift with enormous implications if it gathers momentum. With each drop in share prices--which fell broadly again Thursday--some people even are questioning whether the once-unchallenged investing tenets were a sham to begin with, a conspiracy on the part of powerful and greedy Wall Street and corporate interests to sucker Main Street into the biggest bubble in market history. Listen to Les Greenberg, 59, a semiretired attorney and private investor in Culver City: "There's the corporate elite and then there's the rest of us, going to Versailles Palace and shocked by what we see. People are realizing that a game has been played in the financial markets." Or this posting from an investor on the Web site of mutual fund tracker Morningstar Inc.: "While riding from Los Angeles up the I-5 to Stockton, you pass a section where there are thousands of cows that will soon be slaughtered. It made me think of the millions of honest, hard-working people 'investing' for retirement in high-cost 401(k), 403(b) plans. Most of whom will most surely be financially slaughtered." full: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-investors19jul19.story Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
