The overarching goal of long-term investing is to maintain purchasing power - to outstrip inflation. Running from stocks to bonds likely provides the opposite - a way to lose wealth (purchasing power) slowly.  Do markets move lower in anticipation of worrisome problems that are ahead? Sure they do. Do they stay down? So far, the answer is no, and unless you convince yourself that "it's different this time", there is no need to look further.

Markets often are emotional and unpredictable over the short run, and trying to out-guess the near term direction is foolish. The attached chart illustrates this point showing that, over the long term, stocks drastically outperform bonds. Investing with longer term objectives is much more dependable. Remember the financial planning questions: What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to fix? What do you want to avoid? In most cases, to answer/solve these questions, long-term exposure to the equity markets will be required.

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