Merja Mähkä: The stock market is collapsing, are you ready?

Start-up investors are again intimidated by the stock market crash. Is it to be feared and can be prepared for? These questions are being considered by Iltalehti’s columnist Merja Mähkä.

The stock market always collapses at some point. Unfortunately, the date of the collapse cannot be known in advance. EPA / AOP

There is a certain group of investors who love to intimidate novice investors. They read the stock market signs in the tea magazines and then conspire with the opinion that the stock market will collapse soon.

They find signs of collapse, for example, in the words of taxi drivers and in women’s magazines with interviews with female investors. The idea goes that when we talk about investing everywhere, it’s a sign that the stock market is overheating, resulting in a collapse.

I have been giving interviews to women’s magazines about my investment hobby since 2017. All the while, these “near-collapse” cries have followed me.

Now the traitors are activated again.

Traitors are not in themselves wrong. It is true that the stock market will collapse sooner or later. It is a stock feature, not a fault condition.

This feature can be spoken of in fine economic terms, but in the end it is not impossible to understand.

The stock exchange is reminiscent of the everyday life of a busy year. Somewhere, oatmeal always crashes on the table, Mutti tomato crumbs, which are required for a complete pasta sauce, are out of stock at home and in the shops, and someone accidentally gets a stone on their head and the wound needs to be glued. Extra adjustment confuses everyday life. When you add a little too tight mortgage repayments and worry about your own parents to the mess, you have to think about how to deal with this.

On the stock exchange, most of these have their own counterparts. Sometimes there is a shortage of components. Sometimes there are severe sudden disturbances, such as a corona epidemic. Sometimes there is a threat of rising interest rates, the poison of toxins for both people in mortgage debt and investors. The aging of the population is also a bad thing.

There is always someone happening going on the stock market. My personal favorite is the Moomin Mörö’s cousin, the inflation troll. The inflation troll appears quite rarely now to lurk, but right now, according to headlines, it has risen from the dead to intimidate live investors.

However, during peak years, you will learn that these things will be overcome as well. But the reappears on the store shelf. At the health center, the wound is glued. Do what you can with your parents. If you wait long enough, the oatmeal will dry out on the table unless you clean it off. Then comes evening and the kids go to sleep. There is a moment of calm and life feels light and good.

If the peak years are inexperienced, they may seem daunting. Complaint about their pregnancy is more common than oatmeal in the morning. For the most part, however, we in congested years think that while there is little sleep right now, there will be a lot of joy and comfort in children in the long run.

The same goes for the stock market – news of investor worries and worries is scary for the inexperienced. In the stock market, you just have to get used to them in order to get a return on your money. In the long run, it will definitely come.

The stock market always collapses at some point. Unfortunately, you can’t know the time of the collapse in advance – it’s like a falling oatmeal or a rock that hits your head unexpectedly. The comforters only talk about the collapse as warm. They don’t really know it better than anyone says.

Since the autumn of 2017, the index measuring the return of the Helsinki Stock Exchange has risen by about 50 percent. The EUR 1,000 invested has thus changed to EUR 1,500. If you have missed listening to the comforter and failed to invest, you are now € 500 poorer.

You can prepare for stock market crashes wisely. My favorite piece of advice is time diversification of investments. That means not putting all your money on the stock market at once, but making investing a regular practice. Then you will be invested in all kinds of times, good and bad.

The best investments are made just when the stone has hit the head. It is most convenient to invest on a regular salary. If more money has been accumulated, even more tons, it can be divided into a few installments and invested in at least one year.

When you work with this method you can leave your comfort to its own value.

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