The Gut-Wrenching Play in Investing Right Now: Buy and Hold
May 24, 2025
When a chunk of Bill Jensen’s retirement savings got wiped away in early April, he started to second-guess himself.
His wife urged him to consider switching their savings from stocks into safer investments, but Jensen insisted they wait for the market to rebound. The retired 68-year-old tried to reassure both of them by sending emails showing the gains when their portfolio ended in the green.
Seven weeks later, the couple’s investments had recovered most losses, Jensen said. But rather than taking his risk down a notch, he recommitted to the stock market.
This week, stocks fell again.
The S&P 500 retreated 2.6%, its largest weekly decline since early April, the week of President Trump’s globe-spanning tariff announcement. The benchmark index declined 0.7% on Friday after Trump threatened new tariffs on the European Union and on iPhones made overseas, adding fuel to the trade fears.
Such is the gut-wrenching nature of being a buy-and-hold stock investor these days, with volatility poised to continue. The spring’s tariff turmoil has been a sudden shift for investors who were rewarded with steady gains and few prolonged slumps for their portfolios over the prior two years. It has marked a major test of individual investors’ risk tolerances.
“You have to take the good with the bad,” said Jensen, who added that he had “some moments of regret” during the April selloff. On Friday afternoon, he said he was more optimistic.
It is a truism of long-term investing not to sell in the middle of market upheaval. But that can be excruciating right now, investors say.
Jon Ulin, managing principal at Ulin & Co. Wealth Management in Boca Raton, Fla., said he has been spending lots of his time offering clients moral support in addition to investing advice. He encourages them to stick with their original investing plan and reassures them not to switch seats on an airplane that is going through turbulence. Many just want to hear his voice.
“It’s like a self-help line,” he said.
Some big money managers have been advising a more cautious stance toward the market in recent months. Fund manager Vanguard, for example, has suggested investors consider flipping the classic 60/40 split between stocks and bonds for a more conservative, roughly 40/60 approach.
People who are at or nearing retirement, or who have to shell out money soon for big expenses like college tuition, are thinking especially hard about where to stow their money.
Myra Sletson has lived through enough market cycles to know when to walk away from risk, she said. The 69-year-old retired banker in central Pennsylvania said tariffs were the reason she moved 80% of her portfolio into money markets and CDs. Past downturns, like the 2008 financial crisis, felt more manageable, she said. “I was younger then—in my 50s—with more time to recover.”
Sletson had already been growing cautious, but the April selloff confirmed her decision to shift into safer assets. She says the 4% to 5% returns on certificates of deposit felt like a better deal than staying in the stock market. She doesn’t plan to sit on the sidelines forever. “This just isn’t the moment to be brave,” she said.
There are signs more individual investors are starting to take profits. They pulled a net $555 million out of the stock market on May 12, JPMorgan analysts found, marking the first day of net outflows since April 8, when the S&P 500 hit a low in the week following Trump’s tariff announcement.
But others embraced the risks and bought the dip. They were rewarded for it after major indexes rapidly regained April losses. The retail crowd poured roughly $50 billion into equities between April 8 and May 14, according to an analysis from JP Morgan.
As stocks fell in April, Paul Spriggs didn’t touch his portfolio, including two six-figure 529 college savings accounts invested in target-date funds with significant equity exposure.
History is on his side: Research shows that missing just a handful of the stock market’s best days in the past several decades could shrink an investor’s long-term returns by more than 30 percentage points. Those standout days frequently happen in downbeat markets: Two of the S&P 500’s best days on record took place during October 2008.
Spriggs said it was tough to watch the losses earlier this spring, but not enough to nudge him out of the stock market.
“I’ve got enough of a timeline that I think I can recover,” Spriggs said. “I don’t come from money. I’m a middle-class kid. The only way to get ahead is to play the long game.”
Write to Hannah Erin Lang at hannaherin.lang@wsj.com and Dalvin Brown at dalvin.brown@wsj.com
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