If you are thinking of selling or not buying at this time, read this piece from Morgan Housel’s book: “Psychology of Money”.

I know how scary it feels to see the market crash and still not panic and sell your assets, but read this analysis from Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel:

“Consider what would happen if you saved $1 every month from 1900 to 2019.

You could invest that $1 into the U.S. stock market every month, rain or shine. It doesn’t matter if economists are screaming about a looming recession or new bear market. You just keep investing. Let’s call an investor who does this Sue.

But maybe investing during a recession is too scary. So perhaps you invest your $1 in the stock market when the economy is not in a recession, sell everything when it’s in a recession and save your monthly dollar in cash, and invest everything back into the stock market when the recession ends. We’ll call this investor Jim.

Or perhaps it takes a few months for a recession to scare you out, and then it takes a while to regain confidence before you get back in the market. You invest $1 in stocks when there’s no recession, sell six months after a recession begins, and invest back in six months after a recession ends. We’ll call you Tom.

How much money would these three investors end up with over time?

Sue ends up with $435,551.
Jim has $257,386.
Tom $234,476.

Sue wins by a mile.

There were 1,428 months between 1900 and 2019. Just over 300 of them were during a recession. So by keeping her cool during just the 22% of the time the economy was in or near a recession, Sue ends up with almost three-quarters more money than Jim or Tom.”

So in essence, hold your course and keep buying a small amount of every month no matter what happens. If you don’t keep buying, you will miss the chance to buy low because you will never know when the low is until it’s too late and the market had already recovered, and if you panic and sell everything you will not get back to the market until it has already recovered and you would end up buying after the stocks are much higher than what you sold at.