Nederland, Colorado; When Main Street Met Wall Street; Across Nation, Investors Take Losses With a Calm Born of Long-Haul Outlooks
It is a long way from Wall Street to this mountain community near the Indian Peaks Wilderness 30 miles northwest of Denver, but the ties that bind millions of Americans to the stock market even wind through here.</br></br>As many other small investors did on Monday, real estate broker Liz Ford took a keen interest in the market's stomach-churning plunge. But not for the same reasons. Two weeks ago, the investing newsletter she subscribes to advised its clients to dump their holdings, and Ford moved about three-fourths of her $160,000 in mutual fund shares into cash -- everything except those funds that require a letter to sell.</br></br>Her reaction on Monday? "Yes!" she said, pumping her fist in the air, savoring her adept market timing and anticipating buying back in at significantly lower prices. "I didn't get out at the top, but I didn't get out at the bottom, either."</br></br>Across the hall at the Fowler Real Estate office in this picturesque former tungsten mining town of 1,500 people, her colleague, Jim George, was not celebrating. But he was not despondent either, despite seeing his $90,000 investment nest egg shrink to $58,000 as of this morning. He took his biggest hit in a fund that he belatedly learned has 17 percent of its assets invested in Russian bonds, something he ruefully admits he would have known had he read the fund's prospectus.</br></br>Nonetheless George is holding tight, having learned an earlier painful lesson when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the market dropped, and he sold "and took a hit." "When it's down this much, you can't bail out," said George, who now classifies himself as a long-term investor. "Luckily I have $11,000 in credit left on my Visa card and the grocery store and the gas station take Visa. I'd love to get a $100,000 home equity loan now and put it in the market."