How can I insure against losses? The best “insurance” strategy is to (1) buy and hold while (2) diversifying your assets. This means to buy a wide range of assets representative of the whole range of the economy, both foreign and domestic, and to not buy and sell as individual stocks do well but to avoid fees by just holding the stocks for the long haul. This helps to insure against the risk that a particular company, country, or asset class does badly. However, it has limits: what happens if the entire economy does badly, like during a recession? One option is to buy a “put option”. Buying a put means you are entering a contract with another investor or firm that says that you have the right to sell them a particular asset on a particular future date at a pre-set price. So if you buy an Apple share at $700, you can buy a put at $600 for a particular future date and this means that, if Apple drops to $400 that you can still recover most of your money by reselling it at $600. Quite
Can You Buy Insurance To Protect Your Investment? There are several ways you can protect yourself against market declines with “insurance”. The question is should you buy this kind of coverage and if so what is the best method to do so? As I hinted above, you can protect yourself from nasty stock market spills in any number of ways. Of course one option is to keep your money in cash. If you do that, you never have to worry about the market. You may have other problems that are far worse of course, like never being able to retire. But at least stock market declines won’t keep you up at night. Other than parking your money in cash, there are two popular alternatives that some investors use to protect themselves against the downside of investing in the stock market. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FCIC), which sums up its main job: to insure your deposits. It does this not by charging you premiums like with your other insurance policies, but by charging the banks that it