Market Probabilities

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Hi, I'm Rob West. Ecclesiastes 7-8 encourages us to be patient in trials of all kinds, including our investments. If patience is a virtue, how do we apply that to our portfolios? I'll talk about it today with Mark Biller, and then it's on to your calls at 800-525-7000.

That's 800-525-7000. This is Faith and Finance Live, biblical wisdom for your financial decisions. Well, our guest Mark Biller is executive editor at Sound Mind Investing, an underwriter of this program.

And if there was ever a time for, well, Sound Mind Investing, I guess it's now with all of the ups and downs on Wall Street. Mark, great to have you back on the program. Thanks, Rob.

Good to be back with you. Well, it's always a joy to have you, Mark. And by the way, to our listeners, if you have a question today specifically related to your investment portfolio, the markets, the economy, even what's going on in the banking sector, and we'll get Mark's take on that today, feel free to give us a call. This first portion of the broadcast will be reserved for your questions specifically for Mark Biller and investing at 800-525-7000.

We've got some lines open, 800-525-7000. Mark, of course, we're getting calls every day from folks who are despondent about the losses they've suffered over the past year. So perhaps you could start with some encouragement.

What would you say to them? Yeah, I think the first thing I'd say to them, Rob, is just to remind them that time is on the side of the long-term investor. This has always been true. It was true after the big losses of the 2008 financial crisis.

It was true after the COVID shock a few years ago in 2020. And it's still true after last year's losses whether or not this bear market is quite over with yet. And the second thing, Rob, that I'd try to encourage them with is the fact that the U.S. stock market has been remarkably resilient if you can give it enough time. A portfolio divided 50-50 between large and small company stocks has returned about 11% per year over the last 95 or so years. And if you think about everything we've endured over that time, Great Depression, a world war, and so on, it's just a pretty remarkable thing. But as we're going to talk about today, you have to be able to weather the ups and downs and give it enough time to get those types of returns. Yeah, well, that is encouraging, Mark. It doesn't tell us, though, what the return will be this year, right?

No, it certainly doesn't. And that average does obscure some really wild rides along the way. So in this article that we're going to be talking about, we're looking at these 12-month rolling periods, and we see losses as brutal as minus 69% in a year, gains as breathtaking as positive 240% in a year. And actually, those came back to back in 1932 and 33.

So you can see just how wild the ride can be. And in fact, it's actually been kind of uncommon for stocks to return around that 11% average in any particular year. That's actually the exception rather than the rule. What that really tells us is that it's very normal for the stock market to have its returns kind of vary all over the place, big gains followed by big losses back and forth. And yet, despite that volatility, again, time is on the side of the long-term investor, and the longer you're willing to stay invested, the greater your likelihood of success and hitting those types of bigger long-term returns. Yeah, that's a great reminder. Time is on the side of the long-term investor.

So is patience, of course. Now, you write about all of this in an article at soundmindinvesting.org. It's titled Market Probabilities, What the Past Suggests About the Future. You have a chart in that article. Unfortunately, we can't show that on the radio. But perhaps before our first break here, you could set the stage, give us a mental picture.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would encourage listeners to check out that chart. You can find this article on the Faith & Finance website or our soundmindinvesting.org website. But basically, it just shows that if you picked any random 12-month period over the last almost 100 years and owned stocks, you would have had about a three-quarters chance, 74% chance of making money.

And then as you extend that holding period, those odds get even better. We can dig into that a little bit here in a moment. Yeah, that sounds great. We'll talk about what it shows for one and two years, five years, and even more. We'll also talk about the role of diversification, and we'll get Mark's take on the banking sector today as well, plus, of course, your questions. Questions on investments for Mark Biller today at 800-525-7000. We're just getting started on Faith & Finance Live. Stay with us. Delighted to have you with us today on Faith & Finance Live.

I'm Rob West. With us today, Mark Biller, executive editor at Soundmind Investing and underwriter of this program. We're talking today about a recent article at soundmindinvesting.org.

You can check it out. It's called Market Probabilities, What the Past Suggests About the Future. And this is a real encouragement looking at history, going back all the way to 1926 through the end of last year, on how the market has returned over different periods of time. And it just reinforces something we talk about all the time that we need to be patient and long-term in our investing, and that's really where we're rewarded. Mark, you were explaining about a chart you have that's really helpful in this article. It shows both the probability of the return you'll receive, and it looks at those over different holding periods.

Share that with us. Yeah, so we were saying that over these 12-month holding periods, if you took any 12-month period over the last 95 years, you would have had a 74% chance of making money. That's pretty good on its face, but then as you go out in holding periods and you get out to even just a five-year holding period, losses occurred only about 11% of the time when you hold for five years. So to flip that around, if you hold for at least five years, historically, your likelihood of making money was 89%. As you get out to 8- to 10-year holding periods, your likelihood of making money is more like 97% to 98%. Only 2 or 3% of those 8- to 10-year holding periods had losses.

So that's great. And the other thing I think that's really interesting, Rob, about that table is those giant gains and losses that we talked about earlier, those start to fade. The further out your holding period gets, the less and less likely those extreme types of returns come in, and the more likely you are to get returns around that 11% long-term average.

Yeah, that's really helpful. Now, of course, this assumes certain things like your portfolio being properly diversified, right? Yeah, it does, and it really reinforces that importance of diversification. One of the examples that we highlight in this article is the 10-year period that ended in 2008 with the Great Financial Crisis. The S&P 500 Index, which is really a measure of large company stocks, it actually was negative for that 10-year period.

It was one of those bad 10-year periods for large company stocks. But if we diversify that portfolio very simply by just splitting it in half between large and small company stocks, that small loss turns into a mild gain for that 10-year period. So, again, we're pointing out in this article, in this chart, how volatile the stock market returns can be over the short term, but that that volatility really diminishes as you stretch out your time horizon. And that just reinforces, as you were saying a moment ago, what we talk about a lot, that over the short term, returns are very unpredictable. But they actually become a lot more predictable the longer that time horizon extends. That's why we always recommend at least a five-year holding period if you want to be invested in stocks. And really, 10 years is the ideal that S&I or other financial advisors will often recommend for people. So lots of good stuff in there, even kind of reassuring that the worst recent 10-year period, which was that period that ended with the global financial crisis, even that 10-year period still provided modest gains if you were diversified and held on.

Yeah, and that was obviously a pretty severe case. So encouraging to see that this data holds up even in a period ending with an event as significant as that was. 800-525-7000 is the number to call. We've got a few lines open with your questions, at least in this portion of the broadcast, for Mark Biller related to the market, your portfolio, even the economy, and what's going on in the banking sector. We'd love to hear from you. Let's head to Birmingham. Janet, thanks for calling. Go ahead.

Hello, thanks for taking my call. I am 61 years old, planning to retire at the age of 65. I'm still paying into my 401k through Voya. And of course, you know, that's gone down. But my main concern is about money I have in Edward Jones 401k from a previous employer that's just been, you know, invested. It has gone from, well, in September of 2021, it was 136,000.

And right now it's down to 93,000. Now, I know that's not a lot of money, but to me it is. And like I said, I have four years till I plan to retire. My tax man told me that I should take, well, that I should call Edward Jones and tell him to keep my 401k, but pull out of investments and just fit that money in the money market right now. What do you think about that? Yeah. Mark down about 30 percent in this 401k since September of 2021.

You heard her stage of life. What are your thoughts? Yeah, Janet, my recommendation there is to take a holistic view of your whole portfolio. It's tempting to kind of look at the pieces of your portfolio or the different accounts in this case and kind of look at them in isolation. And I would encourage you to not take that approach, but rather to look at all of these accounts as essentially one big portfolio. Now, that doesn't mean that you've got to diversify each individual account as if it's a separate portfolio. Really, what I'm saying is you want to look at your overall picture, divide that, and allocate that appropriately for your age and your risk tolerance, so figuring out your stock bond allocation. And then maybe you want to take this particular account, this old 401k, and maybe designate that as either your bond portion or if you want to have a cash allocation and have that over there, that's okay. But I would encourage you to not look at that as being separate from the rest of your portfolio and something that maybe you just want to go to cash in that piece because it's separate. Instead, I would look at that as part of the bigger whole and allocate that accordingly. So that, of course, requires you to know what you want your broader stock bond allocation to be, but then to fit that within that broader construct. Rob, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I love that. Janet, I would just ask, following up on that, do you have an advisor at Edward Jones that you're working with? Do you have a relationship separate from your CPA? Yes, I do. Okay. And have you had that conversation with him?

We last spoke about six months ago, and so a lot has changed since then, so I guess I just need to get back in touch with him. But I was just, you know, since my tax guy said, well, you need to pull out and invest because, you know, four years I'm hoping to retire and I don't want to lose any more money. So he, you know, recommended I pull out of investments and sit that money in the money market, so you don't think that's a good idea?

I don't think so. I agree with Mark. I think you need to look at this as an overall strategy. And keep in mind, once you reach retirement, if you're in good health, you need this money to last perhaps two or three decades. And so having an allocation to stocks, given what Mark was just explaining about really the performance of the market over the long haul, if you're a patient, long-term, diversified investor, you're going to win in the end. And as soon as you sell right now, you're locking in those losses. The question would be, are you too aggressive in your portfolio? And that's what you should be talking about with your advisor and you would have the opportunity as the market recovers, and it will, to get more conservative. But you're still going to need a stock allocation, even at age 70, you know, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent in stocks, just to keep that growth component going to offset inflation so this money can last a long time. And pulling out of the market at this point is really going to be counterproductive to that end. That's at least our best advice.

So I'd get back with your advisor and talk a bit more about this. Thanks for your call. More with Mark Biller on Faith and Finance Live just around the corner. Stay with us.

We'll be right back. Great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance Live. With me today, Mark Biller, executive editor at Soundmind Investing. You can read more about this article we've been discussing at soundmindinvesting.org. It's titled Market Probabilities, What the Past Suggests About the Future.

Before we head back to the phones, Harrison called in, Mark, and he didn't want to be on the air. He's listening. He asked for any advice on investing in a bear market. Obviously, we've been in one for some time now. As you take away from this data, obviously, the data says we should be long term. Perhaps that means if we're properly invested, we don't do anything different in a bear market than we would in a bull, knowing that those cycles happen.

But anything you've taken away of particular note that we could share with somebody for times like this specifically? Yeah, it's a little bit of a tricky question, Rob, because we're coming at this now in the middle of a bear market. So as Janet just demonstrated for us, it's one thing if we're early on in a bear market to think about making changes. It's kind of another thing when you're already down 31%.

Then you're really rolling the dice if you're counting on the market going down substantially more than that from that point. So that's really where you get into the whole situation of if a person is thinking about going to cash at this point, they've really got to make a couple of decisions that have to line up right. One, they've got to get to cash now, but then they've got to make a second difficult decision later on of when to get back in. So we've seen, having done this now for a few bear market cycles, being a little bit older, we've seen people at the end of every bear market that are calling us two and three years after the bear market's over saying, I went to cash during the bear market and now I've missed two or three years of the recovery and I'm still sitting on the sidelines.

What do I do now? And we hear this over and over and you see it in the research as well that shows that most individuals who are making those types of decisions on their own really have a hard time doing that successfully and tend to hurt their long-term returns. And so I want to be careful because anybody that's familiar with SMI knows that we do make some of those types of decisions. But again, the big difference is at SMI, we started raising cash and selling some investments for cash at the end of January of 2022.

So that was 14, 15 months ago. That's a very different decision than trying to do that now as things get bad. The last thing I'd say about that, Rob, is I really encourage people, if they're thinking about this, to think about what is your mindset going to be at the potential, if you think we're heading for more of a bear market slide from here, what's it going to be like at the bottom of the bear market? Because by definition, markets bottom when everybody is the most pessimistic, the most fearful, and the least likely to pull the trigger to get back into the market. That's when it's hardest to invest. So it's a very difficult thing to think that you're going to pull out here and then get back in lower. That's just not, unfortunately, that's not how it tends to work out for most people. They tend to stay out way too long and end up chasing back with the market higher than where they sold in the first place. So very difficult way to approach your investing. Yeah, that's really helpful, though, and I appreciate the thoughtful approach with which you just explained that. And I think it really underscores the importance of having a professional money manager like SMI that can be more tactical in these environments. But even if you decide to do it yourself and take more of an indexed approach, as you shared in the data that you just unpacked earlier, you'll still do well if you're diversified with the right investment horizon and you're patient.

And I think that's key. All right, let's head back to the phones. We've got a few lines open. Your questions for Mark Biller today on the markets, your portfolio and the economy.

Eight hundred, five, two, five, seven thousand. Carol is in Florida. Go right ahead, Carol.

Hi, good afternoon. I have money in a 401k. Seems to be a theme for today that I've been doing OK because of the funds that I've got it in, which are very conservative. But I'm getting ready to turn 65. I'm going to probably still work for another five years.

Should I look at potentially pulling some of that money out of the 401k and sticking it into a CDIRA only because I don't want to pull the cash out now because I'm at making quite a good income and I don't want to take the hit at the percentage now rather than wait till after I retire when my income looks lower. Yeah, very good. That or some other ideas. Yeah. And how much of this are you going to need to supplement your income in retirement?

Do you have a sense of that? All of it. OK, so you're not looking to take it as an income stream. You need to have it as a lump sum. Well, no, I mean, I'm putting money away now. I've just gone through some significant personal issues over the years. So the money that I've been able to put away over the last eight to 10 years is my 401k, which is at almost 150,000 and savings and stuff, which is probably at around 40 to 50,000.

Yeah. But of this 160, let's say you're in retirement and now you're whatever income sources you have, is there a gap and you're going to need to fill that gap on a monthly basis with an income stream from this portfolio or are you thinking something different? No, I'm probably going to have to work part time on top of my Social Security and whatever I can pull out of that by per month to make it last. OK, so the idea would be to leave it right there if we can and just pull it out as a monthly income stream. I mean, we would as a starting point, we could look at 6400 a year. That's four percent of 140,000. Now, let's say, you know, that grows or 160,000. Let's say that grows to 200,000 between now and the time you retire. That'd be 8000 a year. Would that get you anywhere close? Six hundred and fifty dollars a month?

Probably not. OK. All right. How much do you think you would need total? OK, well, I'm probably going to get around 3000 for Social Security a month, so I'm probably going to need at some point around another 1500 a month. OK, and that's in addition to your part time work? No, that would be total.

So if I did part time, it would probably be about another 500 to 600 a month. OK, so that may cover it. All right.

We're going to get Mark's take on it. That was really helpful. You stay there. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with much more on Faith and Finance Live.

Stay with us. Great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance Live. I'm Rob West with me, Mark Biller from soundmindinvesting.org. We're talking about their recent article, Market Probabilities, What the Past Suggests About the Future, and a really helpful chart in that a table that shows the probability of how much you'll make and over what time periods drawing from history going back all the way to 1926. What you'll see is with a time horizon, a holding period of eight to 10 years, the likelihood of losing money in any of those periods is just two or three percent. So really encouraging there with respect to being a long term investor.

You can read it for yourself at soundmindinvesting.org. Before the break, we were talking to Carol in Florida. She's about to turn 65, 160,000 in a 401K. Mark, you heard that in retirement, she's going to need beyond Social Security about fifteen hundred a month. Perhaps she can earn as much as half of that from working part time with a portfolio at 160,000 today. She's thinking about an IRA CD.

What would be your thoughts with regard to hanging on in the investment portfolio and being able to generate the kind of income she needs in that season? Yeah, so I really like where these questions are taking us today, Rob, because they really illustrate how a lot of people right now are at a stage of looking at their investments, seeing recent losses and saying, I got to stop these losses. I want to go to cash or I want to go to CDs, something very, very safe. And normally, as you go through rough market waters, folks are a lot more likely to say I need to move some of my stock money to bonds. But today, because we've just had such a rough year last year for bonds, a lot of people are just completely skipping over that step and going straight to I got to go to cash.

I got to go to CDs. Get me out of here. And what I would encourage people with is that we had a historically bad year for bonds and for the bond market in 2022. But part of the reason that a lot of people are so concerned right now is they are looking ahead at, say, the rest of this year, the next year or so. And they're seeing the signs that it appears as if we could be heading towards a recession in the economy. And that's scary.

And I understand that. What I would encourage them with is that during recessionary periods, one of the things that almost always happens is interest rates decline. And as interest rates decline, that is the perfect environment for bond investing. Bonds tend to do very well in that type of recessionary environment. So rather than jumping straight to cash and locking that in, I would encourage people to stick with their bond allocations. You probably have bonds in your portfolio. You're seeing that those went down last year and kind of lumping those in as risky. They're like stocks. They're risky. And I would say actually that as I'm looking out over the next nine to 12 months, really the investment that I'm the most comfortable with today is short to intermediate term bonds.

Those look the best to me of anything out there. So I would really encourage people to resist the urge to bail out of those bond positions. I'm not saying move everything into bonds, but I certainly don't want people gutting the part of their portfolio that probably has as good a chance of anything over the next nine to 12 months of being a really solid performer for them. So stick with those bond allocations. If you feel like you have to do something to get more conservative in your portfolio, you're realizing maybe you're too aggressive, maybe take a little bit of that stock money and move that over to the short or intermediate term bond options within your 401k. That's a good way to get more conservative, take some risk off the table and still be positioned in a place that can have some upside even if we do go through a recessionary dip over the next year or so.

Now, of course, like we're talking about, Rob, with this article, if we're extending that timeline out from the next year to say the next five to ten years, totally different story. Now we're back on that stock train and I'm saying, well, you may have to go through a little bit more of a dip here before this is over. But if you've got that 10 year plus kind of time horizon, you probably don't want to make a lot of changes here with parts of the market already down 25, 30 percent. Yeah, and I think that's my thought, Carol, is that given that this money needs to last decades, if the Lord tarries and you're in good health and given with your part time income, if you could take a reasonable withdrawal rate of about four percent, which once this portfolio recovers after the recession or even before it, you know, you should be able to get it back up to a level that would support that. There would be a case that you don't really make any changes, assuming you're invested in a diversified way among stocks and bonds. But what are your thoughts on what Mark and I have shared?

I do see your point. A lot of my portfolio is already in bonds. I do have some small company and large company growth in value.

I can't remember which is the one, but I've been making between three and four percent every year on my 401k, which I didn't knock on wood quick, didn't take a loss. And then with my employee match on the percentage that I put in, I don't want to lose that either. But I was thinking, you know, to be safe, should I pull some of it out, put it in an IRACD and still maintain the 401k to make the employee match and still take advantage of that? But I'm just I'm just trying to be conservative and save money in case we do in the next couple of years tank and go into a recession.

Yeah, well, the recession is forecasted for this year. And keep in mind, the market looks out six to 12 months, so the market will recover ahead of the economy, which gives you reason to believe that if you were to pull it out now, not only are you locking in those unrealized losses, the data would say you're probably not going to get back in until after it recovers. And so for that reason, you should probably stay the course, see this total portfolio that you have as a part of your total investable assets that you're going to need to last for decades. So you don't look at it like, well, I'm a couple of years from needing this. No, you're you need this to last over the next 20 or 30 years, potentially, if you're in good health, you know, once you reach age 65, your life expectancy is going to be in the in the mid 80s. And so, you know, this is money that you're going to need to continue to grow. Yes, we're going to need it to be stable. And that's why you get a little more conservative, but you're still going to need an allocation to stocks of probably 30 to 40% moving forward. And, you know, the lion's share in bonds, but not necessarily going to, you know, guaranteed banking products, although they look attractive now, you're going to miss out on the recovery, which is really the kind of the focus of what we've been sharing today.

So hopefully, that gives you at least something to think about. If you don't have an advisor, I think that would be a great next step, somebody who can really help you navigate all this and once it rolls out to an IRA, manage it for you or even help you manage it inside the 401k. And if you need an advisor, we recommend a certified kingdom advisor, you can find a CKA in your area.

If you head to our website at faithfi.com, just click find a CKA. Thanks so much for being with us. We've got to take our last break here. When we come back, we'll finish up with Mark Biller today, get to a few more of your questions and get his thoughts on the banking sector. Even news out today as Treasury Secretary Yellen has been talking about in some prepared marks she was giving in a speech, the banking sector and perhaps even further backstops by the government in the case of additional regional banks that might come under pressure.

We'll see what Mark has to say about that. And again, more of your questions at 800-525-7000. By the way, if you want to check out this article we've been talking about head to soundmindinvesting.org. You can read it there.

It's called market probabilities with the past suggests about the future. Much more to come in our final segment. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Thanks for joining us today on faith and finance live Mark Biller with us today from soundmindinvesting.org Mark, before we head back with our final calls of the program today, perhaps your thoughts on the banking sector and all that we're seeing unfolding.

Where do we stand and where do you think we're headed from here? Yeah, so this is a frustrating one for a lot of people, Rob, because it seems like we have these bank problems every so often and I think a lot of people tend to wonder why can't we fix this, you know, you read about these historical bank runs back in the 1800s and early 1900s. And then, you know, even you've had this in the financial crisis 15 years ago and before that the savings and loan crisis in the 80s and you get this idea of why can't they just fix this. And I think that it's helpful maybe to understand a little bit about the system and why the system itself, the banking business is vulnerable to this. And the best explanation that I can offer Rob is that when you make deposits into your local bank, the bank doesn't just put that money in a vault somewhere.

I think people have a misconception sometimes about that. What they do is they take those deposits and then they use them in the economy. They make personal and commercial real estate mortgage loans, business loans, that kind of stuff.

So that money that comes in from you goes out into the economy. And that works perfectly fine unless you get a situation where a lot of people go to the banks and ask for their money back all at the same time. And so that's kind of what happened a couple weeks ago with these specific banks that have been in the news, Silicon Valley Bank being the most prominent, but there have been a few others. And those banks did have some very unique specific things going on with their specific banks that make them different from a lot of the others. But this general setup in banking is common all across the whole banking sector. So that's what makes it very difficult, Rob, to say is this over?

Well, it's impossible to know because there is an element of psychology to this. It seems as if the programs that were put in place a week ago, and as you mentioned, they continue to talk about other possible backstops, it seems as if those have stemmed the tide of panic and concern for now. But it's impossible to say that this is the end of the road. Those of us of a certain age, it's hard not to think back to 2008 when in March we had a bank failure, Bear Stearns, and everyone kind of said, we dodged a bullet there. The market rallied for three more months, and then about six months after that, another bank, Lehman Brothers, failed and we were back in the soup having to deal with all of that that we thought had been cleared up in the spring. So that's just the nature of these credit events.

It's very difficult to predict exactly how it's going to unfold. Now, there are a couple very important things as a depositor that people need to know. First of all, you have every reason to be confident that your bank account is going to be safe because there is a national government program called the FDIC that guarantees individual depositors up to a quarter of a million dollars in their account that you're not going to lose those deposits, you're not going to lose that money if your account is under $250,000. That has always, not always, but for many years, that has been in place.

That is not a new thing. On top of those guarantees, the Fed, as I mentioned, has come in with some additional support, some additional backstops, even beyond that $250,000 level. So if you're a normal individual with less than a quarter of a million dollars in your bank account, as a depositor, you do not need to be concerned about this. Now, if you're running a business that has significantly more cash than that, that's a different story.

And that's really where this issue has evolved to at this point. So we still have a little bit of an issue with businesses not necessarily feeling secure in their local regional banks, the smaller banks, and kind of an exodus taking place from those regional banks into the 15 or two dozen massive big banks that have some additional guarantees. And so that's where there's still a little bit of room where we need to wait and watch and see if there are any more problems with these local and regional banks. But again, that's coming more from the business side than the individual side. So hopefully that's reassuring to individuals listening to this that may be concerned, well, what about my account at my bank? Very little reason to be concerned if you're under that $250,000 threshold. That's really helpful, Mark, I appreciate you unpacking that. And I think that should instill confidence, just like knowing we need to be patient with our time horizon on our investments that we can trust that our deposits are guaranteed and will be available back by the full faith and credit of the United States government.

And although there may still be some other banks to come, the issues are largely going to be liquidity for businesses that need to keep deposits and cash flow more abundant than $250,000. So thanks for weighing in on that. Let's head back to the phones.

Just a few moments remaining in our broadcast today to Tamarack, Florida. Hi, Alicia, your question for Mark Biller. Go ahead. Yeah, I've been contributing to my 401k for some years. And since 2021, I've noticed, you know, I've had a loss just like everybody else. But I contribute like, you know, a little bit over 20% of my income, which comes out to just shy of the $25,000 that we can put in. And I was just wondering if I should just cut back on how much I'm contributing, because obviously, the money I'm putting in, I'm not getting back.

Yeah. Mark, your thoughts? Well, you know, Alicia, I would encourage you to maintain a long term perspective. If a few years ago, it seemed like a good idea to be putting that money in and hopefully seeing that grow over time. I would encourage you to not necessarily overweight the experience of the last, say, 18 months, because bear markets are a part of that investment journey.

Now, if you wanted to temporarily take those new contributions and maybe not be as aggressive in putting those into riskier investments for a period of time, that might be a reasonable, you know, half step that makes you continue to feel comfortable putting it into the 401k, where you're getting that tax deferred beneficial treatment. And then at a later point, you can potentially invest that back according to your your long term allocations when you feel a little bit more comfortable. But again, as we've as Rob and I have kind of been stressing this whole program, really encourage you to not make big changes here in the midst of the bear market after already having some of that damage inflicted. But to keep your eyes on the longer term trajectory of the market for your longer term goals. Rob, your thoughts?

No, I think you're exactly right. Thanks for those thoughts. Alicia, thank you for your call. Unfortunately, we're out of time.

Don, we're not going to be able to get to your question. I appreciate your call today, sir. We'd love to have you back on the program in the future. Mark, as we round out this topic here today, why don't you tie a bow on it for us as you reflect back on this article and what ground we've covered today and what you might leave with our listeners. Yeah, so again, back to where we started, you know, hopefully this is an encouragement to people that time is on the side of the long term investor. The longer your your time horizon, if you're someone who has that five year, 10 year or longer time horizon, you're going to get through this and the market is going to come back. And we would encourage you to to stick with those longer term allocations and process and you'll you'll be rewarded for that, that patience and that discipline.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And Mark, at soundmindinvesting.org, if folks want to explore this further or learn more about the services you offer, give them just a sense of what they'll find. Yeah, so at soundmindinvesting.org, you can find this article. I should also mention, I've written a couple articles on this banking crisis over the last week. So if you'd like to learn a little bit more about that, you'll find those articles. Those are open to anybody.

We do have some of our content only available for members, but a lot of that content, like these banking articles and this article we've been discussing today are available to anyone. So we encourage you to check those out and see if those are helpful for you. Very good, Mark. Always appreciate you stopping by, my friend. Thanks for being along with us. Thanks, Rob. My pleasure. All right. Mark Biller, executive editor at soundmindinvesting.org.

Again, you can learn more and read this article Market Probabilities, What the Past Suggests About the Future at soundmindinvesting.org. Hey, before we wrap up today, let me remind you this ministry here at Faithfi is listener supported, which just means we rely on your listener support to do all that we do to serve you with biblical wisdom as you're seeking to be a faithful steward of God's resources. Your partnership with us financially with a one time gift or perhaps as a monthly giver will go a long way to helping us keep this broadcast ministry strong and continuing to serve you in the future. We'd love to have you join us in that you can give quickly and easily online. You'll also find the phone number to give with one of our team members over the phone or the address to mail in a gift. If you'd like to do that through the end of this month as a way of saying thank you or offering Howard Dayton's wonderful resources, our gift to you, business God's way so you can learn what God says about operating a business and handling money. It's a helpful guide for everyone, whether you're a CEO, a manager running a business large or small, I know it'll be an encouragement to you. Just request your copy with a gift of any amount at faithfi.com. That's faithfi.com and just click it and thank you in advance for your generosity. Well, I couldn't do this without my amazing team. Grateful for Tahira, Clara, Amy, and also thankful for Robert as well.

I'm Rob West and Faith and Finance Live is a partnership between Moody Radio and FaithFi. Hope you come back and join us tomorrow. We'll see you then. God bless. Bye bye. You