Well, that gets into timing the market. I thought we were talking about dependable income streams in retirement. When it comes to retirement income, the "time to sell" is always at the regular interval (i.e. once per year in January). All that's left to figure is the what to sell. The answer: whichever fund(s) has the highest balance (when withdrawing annually it'll probably be 2 or 3 funds). If the energy fund's balance is still one of the ones that's high, that's one of the ones to sell (withdraw from). It's that simple.
And to your point, once commodities go down in price enough the energy fund will no longer have a high balance in be one of the ones to withdraw from. And also to your point, commodities and other asset classes do have times of long downturn. My response to that is, so? Diversification means something's going to be up. That's all that matters for a dependable income stream in retirement.
Look at the graph again I posted at https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4114743/posts?page=51#51. Even if you retired at one of the worst possible times, in this case I started the graph in January 2000 because that was right before the first of 2 major stock downturns (the S&P 500 lost 49% from March 2000 to fall 2002, then it lost 56% from Oct 2007 to March 2009). There's always something that had gained since you retired. Therefore, there's always something to withdraw your retirement income.
Therefore, if diversification gives you dependable income even during major market downturns, why not have a high equity portion in your portfolio so you can have the big gains to fight inflation? A very diversified portfolio of 70% equities / 30% bonds (be sure to have the bonds diversified too) gives you both dependable income and an overall growth to try to beat inflation. You don't have to settle for just dependable income, or just growth to beat inflation. You can have both.
I didn’t take a hit on anything I sold. Over 110K in my garage.
I’m sticking with my plan