Strategies for Recession-Panicked Investors

Paul Sullivan at the New York Times has written "Challenging Dollar-Cost Averaging and Other Bad Ideas". The article emphasizes caution, conservatism, and consistency in current investments. Key criteria mentioned for stock choices are amount of cash holdings and consistency of dividends. From a tax standpoint, the article advocates using deductible tax losses on things that can benefit an investor concurrently. Dollar-cost averaging (periodically investing the same amount of money, netting more shares when prices are low and fewer when prices are high) is discouraged with supporting statistics mentioned in the article. The potential for a further decrease in Treasury yields is mentioned, though not really substantiated.