Places to Go When ETFs Plummet with the Market

When the markets and exchange traded funds (ETFs) get shaky, investors have several safety shelters: Health care, consumer staples, large-cap, utilities, mega-cap, fixed-income are a few options that tend to ride the volatile market waves well. Yet there’s another perhaps more obvious choice that gets overlooked sometimes and that is: cash, says Donald H. Gold for Investor’s Business Daily.

Our investment strategy calls for exiting the market when it dips below the long-term trend line or is 8% off the high. At that point, we put the proceeds into cash. This helps protect gains made as well as prevent further losses. This doesn’t mean we stop looking for the next investment opportunities.

Be aware that switching to cash via money-market funds has come under fire lately because many were found to invest in instruments backed by subprime mortgage loans.