Timing the market turns out not to be a good long term strategy. If there was an easy way to determine a pattern in prices then traders would start to anticipate it and it would disappear. It has also been shown that the bulk of the increase in share prices take place over very short periods so that being under invested at a given time increases the chances that you will miss the rise.

I've got several discussions on my web site about how stock prices are based upon false assumptions about "growth" so I won't repeat them here.

If you are saving for retirement (I don't know how relevant this is in Europe) the best long term strategy is to invest in a low cost, tax deferred, broad market stock fund and continue to make periodic contributions. Then just forget about it until you are ready to retire. Over the past 50 years this has worked out to about 8% which is about 2% over inflation in the US.

Since you asked, my retirement fund started offering a real estate based option about ten years ago. This fund buys real estate and holds it as an investment and as a source of current income from rents. It has averaged about 8% each year over the past decade and has never gone down in value, unlike the stock market. On the other hand it has never had the 20% rises in a single year that the stock market has had either.

Unfortunately I haven't seen any comparable funds offered to the general public. So the best one can do is, perhaps, 50% stock fund and 50% bond fund. The real risk with a stock fund is that if you are planning to retire in a year where it has gone down 30% it is as if you have just thrown away ten years of your retirement savings. This is a big risk to take for a retirement investment.

As to the current decline, the best thing to do for the individual investor is nothing. Panicking or trying to out guess the market is a fool's errand. The markets will recover in a few years at most.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape