Is it safe to get into the stock market yet?

I’m in if for the long haul…and figure I’ve got at least another 20 years of investing before I’m ready to retire. So I look at Obama’s crushed stock market as a great buying opportunity. I just hate watching tens of thousands of dollars disappear from my accounts every few days (or, seemingly, every time Obama goes on TV to talk about the economy).

Via The Political Commentator:

Stock market investing 101?

When will the whistle sound the all-clear telling investors that it is safe to get back into the treacherous waters of stock market investing?

The global economy as well as the global political picture are in as great a state of flux as I have seen since I first started out as a bond analyst on Wall Street some 30 years ago.

Since that time I have witnessed many debacles including the S&L crisis, a large bank failure (Continental National Bank of Illinois), major fraud and accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom), the tech bubble bursting, Ponzi schemes and the financial crisis of 2008 that has extended to the present and that may be spreading into sovereign debt default and the potential disillusion of the EU.

That’s a lot of crises!

We are currently in the age of hyperbole where every crisis or great play in a game becomes the worst or greatest of all time.

This is certainly the case with the press surrounding the financial markets now.

But to someone investing their money in the hope not only of watching it grow, but of avoiding watching it get cut in half, hyperbole and press doesn’t matter nearly as much as preservation of capital.

Invest to play again another day!

If anyone truly knew the answer of when it was safe to go “all in” to the stock market they would, as they say, be living on an island somewhere.

There are too many unknowns during good and stable times to be able to make that call, and during these times of global economic, political and societal turbulence it is just that much harder to predict.

So what is an investor to do in a time where real interest rates (interest rate – inflation) can be negative, the equity markets are mired in negative sentiment, trapped in a downward trend and are extremely news sensitive?