Liquidate entire portfolio until virus is over?

Alexland

womble_87 said:

a journalist just said it as speculation

Probably just made it up.

My children's JISA cash has just arrived and I'm left wondering when to click the invest button. Knowing that I will never time the bottom to perfection is getting around 30% off the values when it was last invested a good enough deal? Greed starting to kick in.

masonic

My transfer left my IF ISA provider today after some heel dragging. I don't think I'll be hanging around when it arrives at iWeb.

bostonerimus

Well I just sold some bonds and bought international and US stock index funds to rebalance my portfolio.

Alexland

masonic said:

My transfer left my IF ISA provider today after some heel dragging. I don't think I'll be hanging around when it arrives at iWeb.

That's why I went with Santander on the Cash JISAs (even though the 123 World rate was only 3.25% compared to Coventry at 3.6%) and AJ Bell (at 0.25% plus trade fees compared to Vanguard at 0.15%, although one of the JISAs is big enough for AJ Bell capped fees) as my experience has shown they are both very quick at ISA transfers which can be important when opportunities occur.

However now I am left looking at the invest button which is tempting me like a Seductive Siren.

snooloui

That didn’t end well.

womble_87

Thrugelmir said:

womble_87 said:

It was suggested (not by anyone official, just a financial journalist) on the news today that the stock markets could be suspended for the duration. 

Where was that reported? 

It has now been mentioned on CNN website.

cnn.com/business/live-news/stock-market-news-today-031620/h_a7be95151afbfe0a3aacbae33d51a85e

Market turmoil has been persistent, and this week looks no better. Now the voices calling for a temporary shut-down of the US stock market are getting louder.
But closing shop is no way to restore confidence, said John Higgins, chief market economist at Capital Economics.
Exchanges stayed open during the 2008 financial crisis, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the Great Depression, Higgins said. The market has been closed for a prolonged period only for practical reasons, such as the four days after 9/11. It has never shut down because of volatility.
In addition, "stock markets have now fallen a long way and so seem to be discounting a very bad economic outcome already," Higgins said. That is why markets might start stabilizing soon, he added.
New York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham tweeted earlier that it was important for markets to remain open and function in an orderly manner.

Sheriff_Fatmen

Dow now - 13%
I've got 40k sitting in bonds and cash in my workplace pension, specifically because I was getting nervous in the bull market. The problem is it takes them 2 or 3 days to do a fund transfer if I want equities therfore impossible to time it. My concern is that the 10% swings are almost daily now. What should I do?  The default equity fund is circa 30% US & 25% UK equities

m_c_s

Some of the modelling projections from Imperial College could push the market lower as things progress. Their report 9 posted today is quite sobering reading and from the discussion section:

"Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty around the limits of hospital surge capacity.

We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.

Our analysis informs the evaluation of both the nature of the measures required to suppress COVID- 19 and the likely duration that these measures will need to be in place. Results in this paper have informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks. However, we emphasise that is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear."

Full report here

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

masonic

Sheriff_Fatmen said:

Dow now - 13%
I've got 40k sitting in bonds and cash in my workplace pension, specifically because I was getting nervous in the bull market. The problem is it takes them 2 or 3 days to do a fund transfer if I want equities therfore impossible to time it. My concern is that the 10% swings are almost daily now. What should I do?  The default equity fund is circa 30% US & 25% UK equities

Is it feasible to split your fund switch into £10k chunks if you are concerned about timing?

Sheriff_Fatmen

masonic said:

Sheriff_Fatmen said:

Dow now - 13%
I've got 40k sitting in bonds and cash in my workplace pension, specifically because I was getting nervous in the bull market. The problem is it takes them 2 or 3 days to do a fund transfer if I want equities therfore impossible to time it. My concern is that the 10% swings are almost daily now. What should I do?  The default equity fund is circa 30% US & 25% UK equities

Is it feasible to split your fund switch into £10k chunks if you are concerned about timing?

Thanks, yes it can be split - I think that's the way I'll need to go with the highly volatile swings.  Really frustrating that there is such a delay on it but it is a good learning point on the difficulties trying to time things, and also the different valuation points for different funds doesn't make it any more user friendly, e.g some valued at noon, 3pm, 5pm UK time.