what about mutual funds as in a 401?.....
It depends whether or not you want to lose money. I moved my entire 401(k) into cash-related investments in December 2006, so I’ve been earning 4% on my 401(k) while most other buy-and-hold mutual fund owners have taken their 20% bear market loss. (I did my best to try to tell everyone this was coming, along with a bunch of other Freepers, all of whom were more or less ignored, but I digress...)
Some would say it is too late and we are near a bottom so you might as well just keep dollar-cost-averaging. I think we have another 15% to go down before the bottom, if not more (these markets often bottom out way lower than they should in response to panic at the exact time people should be buying back in.)
Somebody posted a guess of 1100 on the S&P 500 Index. I think that is a very likely guess. So I don’t agree that it is too late to move to a safe cash-related investment like a money market fund. You won’t earn much of anything, but you will protect your fund from further loss. The liquidity crisis has much further to go and it will continue to drag down the economy and markets with it.
I would go into cash for the next year or so.