If you are not diversified, diversification is always safer than "doing nothing" because doing nothing financially means choosing whatever you currently have your wealth tied into unconsciosuly, whether that's just cash sitting in a bank account, stocks or stocks and bonds, etc.

Get some gold (ideally a bit of physical gold but also put some of your investments into gold or broad commodities ETFs) as a hedge against inflation/monetary devaluation, keep some of your wealth in cash or short-term/liquid bonds/treasuries/money market funds if you predict an equities and real estate crash, buy some real estate or real estate ETFs to get a bit of real estate exposure if you have zero, buy stocks if you have none. Shift a bit of your equities into international ETFs if you only have US stocks.

Splitting up into equal buckets of cash, real estate, stocks, bonds, gold/commodities, hell even a bit of crypto, hell buy some goods upfront to hedge inflation like dry, shelf stable food - this is ultimately gonna be a less volatile ride than just sitting around and doing nothing.

"We're fucked but there's nothing we can do" is a defeatist attitude if you sense financial turmoil but can't predict what type, just don't put all your eggs in one basket, and maybe reduce your diversification once you sense things are getting better.

▲ JKCalhoun a day ago | parent | next [-]

I do diversify (not precious metals or crypto though). Real estate, cash, bonds, stocks. (I could use more international index funds, but see below.)

Still, my sense is that there won't be any safe havens. It will be global, it will be stocks, everyone will be poorer so real estate will be unsellable, inflation destroying cash holdings…

Serious question (I am no scholar on history), where were the safe harbors during the Great Depression?

My ignorant notion is that there were none. But if you held on to your stocks for a couple decades, you did fine … just not during those two decades though.

▲ aurareturn a day ago | parent [-]

  Serious question (I am no scholar on history), where were the safe harbors during the Great Depression?

Cash. Cash because everything became deflationary including a 90% crash in stocks. But I don't see a crash like that (Knock on wood). People are too aware nowadays to buy the dip. If a crash like that happens, then it'd be end times like nuclear war or alien invasion.

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M95D 19 hours ago | parent [-]

It can't be cash today. Back then, cash was tied to gold. Now any governement can print more cash to "ease" the crash and it's the very first thing they'll do.

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josefresco 13 hours ago | parent [-]

So, gold then?

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M95D 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Gold can't be sold (easy), unless you trust the bank to hold it, but then, if the bank fails you might not get your gold or your money back.

Also, gold won't help at all in case of a crash. What you'll need is food and gold value is too big to buy food. Silver might work, but it has taxes unlike gold.

	▲	ninininino 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Gold can absolutely help in a crash. While it's more correlated to equities than bonds or cash, its better to be in equities and gold than pure equities in an equities crash during a period of high inflation.

▲ lotsofpulp a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Real estate ETFs are worthless, they contain all the risks of a real estate investment with none of the upside (leveraging with non recourse debt, 1031, potential property tax incentives, etc).