We did that after the first signals the market was going to falter in early February. We exited on February 26'th. The market peaked around February 19'th when things started to go pear shaped. Missed the peak by a week, but decisions needed to be made.
There was arguments on both sides for staying and riding it out, vs liquidating to safe (albeit low yield) places. We are at least 10 years from retirement so there was an argument for riding it out, but there was also an argument for exiting, going safe, and rejoining the show when all of this is past us and then riding the wave back up. The losses from the theoretical "ride it out this will all be fine" decision stood to be minimal as I failed to see any path where trump wasn't going to do something stupid. But I saw plenty of paths where he was going to put fear into the market which is never good, and that's exactly what has happened.
Our financial advisor suggested exiting, and he was apparently inundated by others who were inquiring about doing the same when many people started to get bad vibes about what was coming. For me, that was mid February. By the time we got out on the 26'th, the first little drop had happened as the rhetoric started to crank up.
Since then, yeah, slow but steady drops up until last weeks cliff.
And I don't think that we've seen the end of this. Until some sort of sanity returns to the white house vs "Smoot Hawley? LOL, hold my beer!" tariff plans generated with ChatGPT. (I'm presuming everyone's heard that story already....?)
Personally, I've been sleeping better at night knowing that we're not exposed to any of this. Honestly, the only risk we're seeing on this decision is if we can time getting back in at the right time to ride the bounce. If Trump came out Monday morning and said "this was all a mistake, we're cancelling everything" (of which the chances are somewhere between zero and zero), markets will skyrocket - that's the wave to ride. He could also come back out later the same day and say something stupid again and cause another dump. It's a total shitshow currently, and although he lived and died by the stock market in his first term, equating his success to market gains, that seems to be out the window now, so who knows exactly what is feeding all this, and what's ahead.
