Missed the rally? Surging markets spur tough choices
AuthorAffiliation Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal</br></br>"I was afraid to get into this bond rally until it went past me and I missed most of it," Mr. Dakin says. "Now I don't feel there is much room left in the bond market, and I think the stock market is overvalued, too. So I'm sitting and waiting."</br></br>Mr. Dakin is just one of hundreds of thousands of investors confronted with the agonizing choice: to jump into stocks or bonds now and hope to ride prices even higher, or to wait it out until a correction sets in and brings down prices to more reasonable levels. To jump in now is to risk buying at a peak, but to wait amid a ferocious rally is almost as unnerving.</br></br>And the question isn't confined to individual investors.</br></br>"The problem is, where do we put the money now?" says Steven Leuthold, president of Leuthold Group, a money-management and consulting firm in Minneapolis. "We bought the heck out of bonds when they were up at 8%, but now they're down below 7% and we're thinking of taking some money off the table. And in the stock market, we see a 30% downside potential with only a 5% to the upside. It's getting tough to find good values."