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By Roger Nusbaum, AdvisorShares ETF Strategist A big part of successfully engaging in markets (success defined as not doing yourself in with poor decision making and having enough money when you need it) is revisiting certain principles that although crucial can be forgotten when they are most important. A great example of this is holding onto a small allocation to gold for its low to negative correlation to equities. I’ve written about this regularly for more than ten years with the main points being that gold continues to not look like the stock market. That was true ten years ago when equities were flattish and gold went up, it was true during the worst of the financial crisis when stocks went down a lot and gold was kind of flattish, it was true in the most recent bull market when equities rocketed and gold sunk. It is playing out as true now as equities have rolled over for the last six months while gold and mining stocks too for that matter have gone up. Play around with some ticker symbols on Google Finance and you’ll see that the S&P 500 is down high single digits for the last six months while ETFs tracking gold are up about 10% and ETFs tracking miners are up in the neighborhood of 30%. While I don’t think too many investors will want to take on the volatility that goes with the miners, the point is still the same. I continue to believe that if gold is the top performing holding you have then chances are things are going so well in the world and that seems to fit right now. Questioning gold’s role as a portfolio holding gained momentum in the media and blogs as equities continued to rally which is in part about impatience which to the intro of this post is one behavior that does investors in. This ties into a slightly bigger concept or investing belief about defense being more important than offense or as I’ve described it; smoothing out the ride. Using gold to help with that objective can be done without having to be very tactical with it; you own it and without having to figure out when equities might turn down, you have the position in place for whenever they do. Clearly this does not resonate with everyone; if it does not resonate with you then you probably don’t own any gold and if it does resonate with you, then you do have some gold but the time to make this decision is not now when volatility is sky high and emotions/indecision might also be elevated. Bigger picture still, is the importance of remembering why you chose whatever you chose for your approach to investing and knowing what type of market environments play to your approach’s strengths and weaknesses. Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Additional disclosure: To the extent that this content includes references to securities, those references do not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy, sell or hold such security. AdvisorShares is a sponsor of actively managed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and holds positions in all of its ETFs. This document should not be considered investment advice and the information contain within should not be relied upon in assessing whether or not to invest in any products mentioned. Investment in securities carries a high degree of risk which may result in investors losing all of their invested capital. Please keep in mind that a company’s past financial performance, including the performance of its share price, does not guarantee future results. To learn more about the risks with actively managed ETFs visit our website AdvisorShares.com . Scalper1 News
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