Happy Birthday Cass!

-t that sounds great!

Yeah I saw that basically were all about to have Elon in our stupid 401ks like it or not and I have no idea how I would divest from that and still be in an appropriate setup (currently in the “retiring in (year)” thing that’s available) because I 100% believe that shit will crash and probably soonish?

This is only true if you are invested in an index fund that tracks NASDAQ, which basically changed its rules so that SpaceX would be fast-tracked into the index in 15 days vs the minimum 3 months. So, by design, any index fund will have to buy SpaceX to mimic the index. Luckily the S&P already said they will not do that. Still broader markets are going to be impacted by the inherently volatile nature of a stock that is running on pure FOMO right now.

Everyone should do what they think is best for their situation, but I started my adult life working in investment consulting and remember all too well my old 401K from that job losing half its value in 2008-2009 so here is what I have been doing (because of SpaceX and other upcoming AI IPOs but also Orange Foolius nonsense):

1) Since the election, when stocks have a good run for a week or more, I pull out the "winnings" from my various stock funds and move them to cash. And by cash, I mean a cash fund within my IRA portfolio at Vanguard which earns on par with a high-yield savings account, 3.5%-4.0%. At this point I'm like a third in cash or so. If there is a huge fall, that fund won't drop and I can move more back into stocks when they are low. I've been doing this mostly because the market was riding high* under Biden so I figured it was already due for a fall and at a minimum Trump's policies would mean volatility. I didn't expect all of the insider trading shenigans, but still.

(*So high that when I took out money to pay rent in the dark year of no income, the money replaced itself in less than six months. I also essentially paid no penalty for doing so because, while I had to pay the 10% penalty for early withdrawal, I didn't pay income taxes on it because it was my only income and it was under the standard deduction. While it may be the right decision to pay off debt with early withdrawal, anyone contemplating doing so should factor that 10% penalty into their calculations, and, in California, the 2% or so penalty added on to that.)

2) With 20% or so in bond funds, I still have about 50% in stock funds, and, until a couple of weeks ago, this was mostly in the S&P index and other growth funds since I'm a somewhat aggressive investor. Growth funds are often tech heavy and the S&P is heavily influenced by tech companies right now. Like a ridiculous percentage of the S&P's valuation is in just a few massive tech companies. So, given these upcoming IPOs, I moved a bunch of that money into my exisiting international stock index fund and picked up a value fund. Just for diversity and stability I should have added the value fund ages ago but, as I said, I'm a fairly aggressive investor. I didn't even have anything in bonds until a few years ago. Any major index fund company (Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab) will have some funds labeled growth and value specifically. If you have a "retire in X" year fund like meara, your fund is essentially doing this "conservative" shift for you over time, in that they move to a more dividend and bond-heavy allocation as the retirement year approaches. So, if you are worried about the markets and want to shift your money to be even more conservative, you can switch to an earlier year. The year doesn't have to match your actual retirement year. (For example, my tiny Roth 401K, which I also have at Vanguard, is in one of these types of funds but I have it set for 2040. See above re aggressive investing.)

Anyway, probably more than you want to know, and of course, it's impossible to predict how markets are going to do in the future, but that's what I've been doing. And I'll probably continue to shift any "winnings" periodically when there are significant short-term gains.