A Historic Buying Opportunity?

Seeking Alpha featured “Have We Reached a Historic Buying Opportunity?” Here are the last two paragraphs:

The main thing I can say about the current environment, Matt, is though I can’t tell you what is running when or if we’re stuck in a 1-year rut or a 5-year rut, what I do know is that the general area we’re in is a historical buying opportunity: a once-in-your-lifetime chance to get your asset allocation plans squared away and really make sure you’re saving what you need to be.

Because we may go down more… we may not even have hit a bottom (though I, like Matt, do think we have), but anyone coming in anywhere down here is not going to be hurting at the current cost basis, if you’ve got a 10- or 20-year horizon, and I don’t care if you’ve got a value tilt, a growth tilt or are 50/50 on your U.S./international weighting.

It’s simply amazing to me that this author continues to harp on a once-in-your-lifetime buying opportunity by getting asset allocations set up and using a 10 to 20 year horizon.

Has nothing been learned from last year’s disaster? I wish the author would take the time and talk to some investors who saw their portfolios cut in half during 2008. These investors will have to spend the next 8 to 10 years just trying to make up losses. To ask them to return to mindless buy and hold investing while we’re still in the midst of a bear market simply borders on ignorance.

While you can get away with buy-and-hold for a while during bull markets, the problem always remains that there is no exit strategy involved to save your bacon if the markets tank. We’re on the dark side of the biggest credit bubble in history and to think that all is smooth sailing from here is simply not being in tune with reality.

I feel part of my job is to point out useless articles like the one above so that investors don’t make the same mistake again of trying to get front row seating on the Titanic.