What you should do with your 401(k) in a highly volatile market

NEW YORK -- For individual investors, the quick-turn global rout in stocks on Monday was unsettling, despite news Tuesday that stocks staged a rally.

Also unwelcome: Expectations that volatility will continue for the foreseeable future. Investment strategists at retirement investment advisory firm TIAA expect it to last at least through the presidential election, said Doug Ornstein, a director on TIAA's wealth management team. That's thanks to uncertainty around the presidential election outcome, concern about interest rates and economic factors like jobless claims, as well as geopolitical risks.

But if you're investing in a 401(k), daily market dramas are no reason to take dramatic actions with your portfolio. Not only are down days and periods of volatility normal, they can create good buying opportunities for the managers of the funds in which you're invested. "It's important to remember pockets of opportunity are always on the other side of the storm," Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist at LPL Financial, said in a statement.

Andy Smith, executive director of financial planning at Edelman Financial Engines, puts it this way: "Separate your emotion from your money. There will be days when the market is up and days when it's down. Focus on your time in the market rather than trying to time the market."

His point: It's impossible to know the best time to get out of the market and then the best time to get back in.

What's more, Ornstein said, "Typically, the best days in the market follow the worst days." Over the past 20 years, he added, if you had stayed fully invested in the market throughout, your average annual returns would be nearly twice what they would have been had you missed the 10 best days.

As a 401(k) investor, the best thing you can do is to save as much as you can, diversify your holdings to minimize the risk and volatility in your portfolio, and rebalance your holdings if your chosen asset allocation gets too far out of whack, Smith said.

Checking to see if you need to rebalance your portfolio is something you should do at least once a year anyway - but most people never do.

Say you set up a portfolio of 70% stocks and 30% bonds but now it's morphed into a 60/40 portfolio. If 70/30 is still the right allocation for you, given your goals and time horizon, you can direct your 401(k) administrator through your plan's online portal to rebalance your holdings accordingly.

If you're within five to 10 years of retirement, Smith said, the advice is also to save as much as you can and diversify, but you might want to start slowly reducing risk in your portfolio by lowering your stock allocation somewhat from where it was when your time horizon was longer.

And for anyone unnerved by volatility, remind yourself periodically that even bear markets have not stopped the long-term increases in stocks over time. For example, the S&P 500 has risen more than 80% from August 5, 2019 through yesterday. And since 1960 there have been far more positive annual returns on the S&P 500 than negative ones, Smith said.