After a down day Thursday, the U.S. stock market has continued its plunge Friday morning on news of the new tariffs from the Trump administration.
What should you do if you're invested? What do you do with that 401K when the markets are tumbling?
Bruce Helmer is the founder of Wealth Enhancement Group in the Twin Cities, and has seen market volatility before. He always cautions his clients to stay the course, and remember how far the market has come.
"This retraction that we've had year-to-date, we haven't lost money in the last, you know, 30 months," he explains.
Helmer does say that he expects the volatility to continue under the Trump Administration and it's hard to say what the the impact of the tariffs will have on companies and consumer.
"This policy, these tariffs, it's gonna be interesting to see how other companies, other countries respond and whether companies pass these increase in their costs down to the consumer, or how much of this they absorb themselves," Helmer says. "So it's gonna be interesting. But Wall Street does not like uncertainty, and we have a lot of uncertainty right now."
Helmer says even with the drop, the long term performance is still positive.
You're still in the black," he says. "If you've been in the market the last 234 years, you're still in the black. But the question then is, what do I do now? And I would say, if you're gonna retire and you're gonna need this retirement plan in the next year or two - or less - it probably does make some sense to reduce your stock exposure. It probably does make. Not because of the retraction that we had today, but because of your personal time horizon to when you're gonna use that money. You should have already done it, and it's not too late to still do it now."
Helmer does say long term investors don't have to worry about the fluctuations, but should diversify in order to protect themselves in the future.
Stock markets worldwide are careening even lower Friday after China matched President Donald Trump’s big raise in tariffs in an escalating trade war.
The S&P 500 dropped 2.7% early Friday, coming off its worst day since COVID wrecked the global economy in 2020.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,000 points, and the Nasdaq composite tumbled 3%.
Not even a better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market was enough to stop the slide. European stocks saw some of the day’s biggest losses, and the price of crude oil tumbled to its lowest level since 2021 on worries about how a trade war could cause a recession.