That Recession Thread

[Brad]

I'm not one who plays the stock market.  I'm normally a buy and hold for the log run sort, but our giant recession thread finally got to me.  I didn't panic and shift to gold, but in my annual meeting with my investment adviser I made some adjustments.

1. Shifting some mutual funds from "Growth" to "Value" stocks which should be less volatile.

2. But contrary to this I did move some money into a mutual fund that only invests in renewable energy.  That's higher risk, and I figure it will have it's ups and downs, but long term I think it will it is the future.

All that said, I'm pretty heavily diversified.

[ergophobe]

I'm worse than you in terms of being an active (or even modestly conscientious) investor.

But I have a... there's an acronym for it, but a mutual fund with social responsibility filters. It actually has pretty high expense ratios and was going to dump it for another one with much lower ratios, but then I saw that it has been beating the S&P 500 most years, even with the expense ratio.

The problem with mine is that, unlike yours, it doesn't focus on a sector, it focuses on *avoiding* some companies and sectors and otherwise mimicking an S&P 500 fund. So if you want to do that, how do yo do it? Lots of Apple, Google, Amazon, etc...

But for various reasons, I currently have a lot of cash by my standards. It's sort of ridiculous... enough to live on for several years actually. And the recession fear has me sitting on it as cash. I keep debating whether or not to just put it in some diversified value funds funds.

If you're not comfortable answering this, I understand, but which value funds and renewable energy funds did you like?

[Brad]

The renewable energy fund is: iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN)

There may be others but this fit my criteria.  I doubt I'll get rich off it but the trend is there and I finally identified a trend early enough.

As for the Value funds: I suppose this big fat envelope contains info and I should open it.  Frankly, most of these funds contain a mix of both Growth and Value stocks and I'm switching to funds that are weighted a bit more to Value and less reliant on Growth.  I got that from the adviser before my eyes started glazing over.  :-)  It's a pretty conservative shift: I'm not buying gold or silver or a bunker in a mountain.  But I'm getting older so time to be a little more conservative with investments.