FRAUD NOTICE:

Is there a more dispiriting financial situation than working hard and investing intelligently for your assets only to have some or indeed all of them pinched from your back pocket by a sophisticated scam?

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has recently warned against this possibility, calling on taxpayers to beware of “a surge of new, sophisticated email phishing scams”, particularly during the Christmas and New Year period.

This warning follows IRS data charting how the incidence of online scams rose by 60% during 2018 – an especially dramatic rise when it is considered that each of the previous years recorded a decline. Furthermore, with the vast majority of scams occurring at the end and the beginning of the year, it is clear that the IRS message is timely.

It is easy to see why many retirement investors may be tempted by the prospect of timing the market: imagine if you could ensure that you only ever invested in stocks at the time when the market was rising and only ever sold at the time when it was cresting like a wave that is about to crash.

However, your chances of timing your trading to perfection are, in reality, likely to be comparable to predicting the jackpot numbers in the lottery and chancing your retirement savings in such a way is likely to be at best a risky proposition and at worst, a catastrophe.

The reality is that there is no scientific way to time the market. This is not to say that there are no strategies you can utilise in order to protect and grow your wealth, only that these are going to be less about timing and more about foresighted planning, i.e. investing early in order to enjoy long-term gains and having a well-diversified portfolio of retirement assets that is able to withstand the inevitable volatilities of the market.