Its just too much. . . . .
Well, when you get down to trying to time the squiggles in the chart, with today being a really, really big squiggle, the advantage goes to the insiders gaming the system from within.
On a longer term perspective, however, at least for an individual not responsible to outsiders for how well you did against the market benchmark this quarter, it can be much simpler, at least on the long side.
It's probably too late to sell in this cycle, at least in force, unless you have some crystal ball that tells you that you can sell at 35% or so down and definitely will be able to rebuy later at 60% down. Otherwise, you've just bought high and sold low, perhaps at what even may prove later to be the bottom, which doesn't tend to be a profitable investment strategy.
So that leaves buying at this point, assuming available cash reserves. I'm kicking myself for not having my shopping list with price targets selected sitting all ready to go. It's really hard to cull that together on the fly while working, with the bullets flying, and with the target price windows being open for only a brief interval as the market gyrates wildly.
What I'm looking for while pulling that list together belatedly -- as the initial screening criterion -- is S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats that are hitting 85% of their pre-crash five-year low. They're putting blue chip companies with a record of increasing dividends of 25 years or more on sale. That kind of deal doesn't come around every day.
It's not a novel concept to do something generally more or less along those lines -- it's what Graham, Buffett, etc., etc., etc. all tend(ed) to do (albeit not necessarily pulling stocks specifically from that list).
I'm not necessarily backing up the truck at this point, but I definitely am nibbling -- with the full understanding that I'm not likely to catch the absolute bottom tick on anything. But that I very likely later will be sitting pretty assuming -- as usually happens -- we ultimately pull through all this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S&P_500_Dividend_Aristocrats