--- title: Should You Be Afraid of the Stock Market? | TIME description: Stock market volatility can make many investors nervous, but following some simple rules can help young investors feel more confident. canonical: https://time.com/video/3d5dkoSh/ og:title: Should You Be Afraid of the Stock Market? og:description: Stock market volatility can make many investors nervous, but following some simple rules can help young investors feel more confident. og:url: https://time.com/video/3d5dkoSh/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/3d5dkoSh/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Should You Be Afraid of the Stock Market? twitter:description: Stock market volatility can make many investors nervous, but following some simple rules can help young investors feel more confident. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/3d5dkoSh/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Should You Be Afraid of the Stock Market? > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Should You Be Afraid of the Stock Market? [Watch (HLS stream): Should You Be Afraid of the Stock Market?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/3d5dkoSh.m3u8) (3:53)  _Published 2015-04-08. Stock market volatility can make many investors nervous, but following some simple rules can help young investors feel more confident._ --- Jul 27, 2023 6:07 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Nature of Stock Markets](/video/FNyA7mBI/) ### The Nature of Stock Markets [Stock Market Secrets: Buy a Birkin\! ](/video/MXra4oyz/) ### Stock Market Secrets: Buy a Birkin! [What Happened to China's Stock Market?](/video/XCviqHuD/) ### What Happened to China's Stock Market? --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Hey, I'm Kara Brandeisky. I'm Jake Davidson. Welcome to Millennial Money Minute, today we are here to talk about whether you should be afraid of the stock market, So Jake, I work for Money Magazine, I know the importance of investing, but truthfully, I'm just kind of scared, you know, I came of age during the financial crisis. I know that we're six years into a bull market. And that's pretty long. We're kinda due for a crash. Historically, bull markets like this only last four years or less. So I just, I feel like there's danger ahead, and I kinda want out. Talk me off the ledge. So Carrie, you're right. I mean, to a certain extent at least. At least. The, a lot of experts will say that this market is currently over valued. Price to earnings ratio are above historical norms. But two things to remember. The first being is that, the financial crisis that we just experienced is generally much worse than the kind of correction that you're talking about where we go from bull to bear market. But second of all you're investing for the very long term. So even if we do have a correction in the next couple years it doesn't really matter. Because over the long term you're going to be fine. The stock market will go up. And the way you know that is, that we're actually, the S and P 500 is better off than it was in 2006 before the financial crisis. But here's the thing, Jake, during a downturn you can have two problems at once: your portfolio can be losing value and maybe you're losing your job. So what we saw during the financial crisis is that people's portfolios lost like 37 % of their value at the same time that they were unemployed. So a lot of people had to sell their stocks at a loss because they needed money. That's true and I think a big danger. When you're resting the stock market is not having some kind of emergency fund to make sure that you can ride out market corrections. Because the thing is if you actually are able to hold on to your investments through a correction, then you'll be okay. If you have to sell during that correction, then you actually are gonna lose money. All right. So how much of an emergency fund should I have? So you generally wanna have between six months and a year of either wages or, if you can, just measure living expenses to make sure that the amount of money you have in your bank account actually holds up. So that sounds pretty good. But where do I even start? How do I go out and buy a stock? So that's a great question. You don't actually buy a stock, or even multiple stocks. What you do is you invest in something called an index fund, which is a portfolio of stocks that are, seem to generally represent the US economy. And when you are picking index funds, you want to pick one with the low fees. Because a 1. 5 % expense ratio can actually take away 40 % of your returns over 40 years. Wow, so basically you're losing a lot of money for no reason. That's right. That's stupid. That's right. [ MUSIC ]. So when should I get started investing? So you want to get started as soon as possible. Obviously, as we talked about, you want to get your emergency fund set you have a cushion in case things go wrong. But if you waited until you're 30 as opposed to starting investing when you're 25, you're actually going to lose 25 % of your overall returns before retirement. That's a lot. And you don't want to be, when you're about to retire, thinking about how you should have started investing [ MUSIC ] [ INAUDIBLE ] When you were younger. All right, so I feel a little bit better, but I'm still kind of worried. So what if I put half my money in stocks, and half my money in bonds, how would that work? So if you were like an old person, that would make sense. Because you wouldn't have as much time to ride out any kind of blips. And you'd need the money very soon, and you need it to be safe. But, you're not. You have plenty of time, going head to ride out any market corrections and honestly, if the US economy doesn't grow and the stock market doesn't grow for you over the next 40 years or so it's basically the zombie apocalypse and you have bigger problems to worry about. So don't panic America. 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