Is it too late to get into the stock market?
Year to date, the U.S. stock market as measured by the S&P 500 index, according to Thomson Reuters, is up 18% excluding dividends.
It can be tempting to hold off on buying more stocks at these prices.
After all, the longer a bull market runs, the closer we are to the next bear market.
Any longtime reader would know I’m going to argue for staying the course and adding money if you have extra cash on hand.
Hartford Funds and Ned Davis Research looked at the 20-plus-percent drops of the first two decades of this century and found that, if investing in the S&P 500, on average, the investor would have recovered the entire drop in 2.7 years.
One time, following the dot-com bubble, it took 6 years. After the financial crisis, 4.5 years.
Meanwhile, and this is key, it …