Protecting Your Retirement Nest-Egg

As your retirement savings grow with the passage of time, the common sense arithmetic changes also.  In particular, as you approach "critical mass" in investments, the ability of those savings to produce an income approximates (by definition) the earning power of your regular job.  You must put as much effort into guarding your savings as you put into guarding your job.  What also changes is the equation of risk.  If you are putting most or all of your nest-egg into labile growth investments (e.g., equities), then you can only afford to lose a small portion of it.  Investor risk is the arithmetic product of the amount ventured and the probability of loss.  How much of your income can you really afford to lose?  Exposure to a bear market can typically erode 20-50% of value.  Recent market gyrations have revealed the danger of strategies such as buy-and-hold investing, dollar-cost-averaging, and share-accumulation during a market downturn.  The problem is that these strategies keep your life savings in harm’s way because they strive for the accumulation of assets that are falling in value.  Infrequent but ruinous downward market cycles can chew up long periods of asset growth in very short periods of time.  Many investors now feel that they must take some responsibility for the management of risk to their own retirement nest-eggs.  Specifically, recognizing nasty downward trends in time to transfer most of your savings to a safe haven (e.g., money-market, guaranteed funds) is your overriding concern.

But where can you find the time to do exhaustive market analysis? 

That is where the fractal "Robert" charts come in.  The unique virtue of this type of graphic is that it allows you to confirm whether your investment is currently cycling in a bullish or bearish domain, and it only takes a glance.