Do money markets fluctuate during market crashes?
As the commenters have already indicated, money market mutual funds are not guaranteed to maintain principal during all market conditions, and investments in mutual funds are not insured against loss due to market changes. That said, you can run a price search on Vanguard's website and see these results: So, despite all the economic problems since 1975, VMMXX has never traded at a price other than $1.00. "Wikipedia has a solid article on Money Market Funds which includes a section on ""Breaking the Buck"" when the money market fund fails to return its full dollar.  Money market funds smoothing out the daily (generally small) fluctuations of investing in short-term treasuries directly but have similar risk over longer periods.  Some funds can and have lost money in market crashes, though even the worst performers still returned 95+ cents on the dollar. While few investments are guaranteed and likely none in your retirement account,  money-market funds are likely the choice you have with the least fluctuation and similar minimal risk to short term treasuries. However, a second important risk to consider is inflation.  Money market funds generally have returns similar or less than the inflation rate.  While money markets funds help you avoid the fluctuations of the stock market the value of your retirement account falls behind the cost of goods over time.  Unless the investor is fairly old most financial professionals would recommend only a small portion of a retirement account be in money market instruments.  Vanguard also has a set of target retirement investment funds that are close to what many professionals would recommend.  Consulting a financial professional to discuss your particular needs is a good option as well."
Shit article that displays the author has no farming idea of how Warren Buffet operates.    The man has metrics that tell him when shares are too expensive. When this happens, he doesn't buy, and dividends can tend to accumulate when you have almost $500 billion in assets (which could just be 2 years of 5% dividend yields).   If they are expensive, he won't buy, and money will accumulate. When there is a crash, he buys on the cheap. That how you get 23% of Year-on-year gains for 40 years.   The fact that he is not buying does indicate that the market is overvalued, which is consistent with the fact that there is still a substantial amount of QE. The question is: what will happen as the Fed winds it down. They are aiming for a small decrease or leveling out of the stock market. If that happens, and the market stagnates for a couple of years, maybe the metrics will catch up and he will buy again without a crash happening. Cash would be the better alternative assuming both stocks take a major hit in ALL categories AND the Fed raise rates at the same time for some reason. Money market funds that may have relatively low yields at the moment would likely be one of the few securities not to be repriced downward as interest rates rising would decrease bond values which could be another crash as I could somewhat question how broad of a crash are you talking here. There are more than a few different market segments so that while some parts may get hit really hard in a crash, would you really want to claim everything goes down? Blackrock's graphic shows in 2008 how bonds did the best and only it and cash had positive returns in that year but there is something to be said for how big is a crash: 20%, 50%, 90%? "I can, but it takes a significant amount of time.   I'll do a short version which unfortunatley might leave more holes than you like. Basically, traders don't want to barter because it is hard to find the person with precisely the goods you want who wants to trade for the goods you have. Thus the need for ""coupons"" that represent value in a marketplace. Then you need to decide who gets to create coupons. If too many can issue them, problems arise, and no one trusts the coupons will be good later. Eventually you want one large bank/nation/trader to be able to issue them so everyone has the same level of trust in them, and you don't have the economic inefficiencies of many coupon issuers.  Next, the number of coupons needs to be enough to facilitate trade. If the amount of trade increases a lot, and the number of coupons doesn't increase similarly they become worth more, and people start to hoard them. This causes deflation, which causes less investment, which causes less growth, which hurts everyone in the long run.   If there are too many coupons added, this causes inflation, which causes people to spent them quicker instead of holding them. For reasons I won't cover here slight, predictable inflation is much better than deflation, so remember inflation is slightly preferred. Note that inflation is often caused not by the number of coupons but by external price changes.  Now, for a modern economy to do well, somone has to watch the economy, measure it carefully, and add/subtract coupons into the system as needed. Coupons, like all money, have no real value (whatever that means), but only have value because the holder expects to be able to trade them *later* for goods and services. You cannot eat coupons, use them for shelter (usually!), or wear them, but you want to trade them for such needs. The same is true for paper money, gold, stones, or almost whatever money system one uses. Money in all these forms is merely an IOU tradable for future goods.  The Fed is tasked (among other things) with making sure there is precisely enough coupons in the economy to keep trade functioning as well as possible. This is very hard to do since there are external and internal shocks to an economy (think disaster, foreign govts shutting off resources, rapid changes in people's tastes, etc.).   Central banks such as the Fed need to be independent of political control, since empirical evidence has shown that politicians tend to add more money to the system than is needed, because the short term gains give them votes, but the long term consequences (rapid inflation, unemployment, lower economic growth) are bad for society. This is why the Fed is largely out of congressional control, and large amounts of empirical evidence across hundreds of years and dozens of cultures shows this to be good.  Note: another function of the Fed is to be a lender of last resort to help prevent bank panics that were widespread in the 18th and early 19th century, something that none of us now remember, but it was a real problem. I'll skip that part for now.  So now we're at the point where the Fed needs to add/subtract coupons from society. To do this part justice takes significant time to cover all the reasons why various rules are in place (banking reserve requirements, for example), and you cannot learn it from one pass of reading.  But I'll try. Instead of being like the majority of internet fools that rail against the system, try to learn the *why* of all this, and you'll be much wiser and understand that it is all a pretty good system.  One method they use is the interbank lending rate. Banks have a reserve requirement, which is the ratio of coupons they need to have on hand as a ratio compared to the total coupons depositors lent them. This is usually around 1:10. The amount deposited that they can lend goes to business loans, school loans, mortgage loans, etc., and helps economies grow. Now when a bank on a given day falls short due to too many withdrawals, other banks (or the Fed) offers an overnight loan to meet reserve requirements, and the Fed sets the interest rate, which in turn drives other interest rates in the system.  This does not change the money supply very much.  Secondly, the Fed sets the reserve requirement, which vastly can change the amount of money available to society. But they change this rate so rarely (all the historical data is on the St. Loius Fed site, among others) that it is not usually an issue. I'll explain below how this can drastically change the money supply though the money multiplier.  Thirdly, and this is the part the poster above seems upset about, they conduct open market operations. This is the primary means by which the Fed exercises control over the number of coupons in play. The government, like businesses, like individuals, often needs to borrow money, in theory to invest in wise causes like infrastructure or perhaps money making enterprises such as technology investmeny (and I know what they often use the money for causes many to complain). The government, like companies, offers the sale of various contracts such as bonds to investors, who want a place to park some accumulated coupons for safety, and they get a return plus some interest. So the government sells bonds on the open market to investors, banks, pensions, foreign governments, basically to whomever wishes to purchase them at the market rate, and the government, like many individuals and banks, uses these loans to perform day to day functioning and possible smooth out volatility in spending needs. By law the Fed cannot purchase directly from Treasury. Now, once on the market, these bonds are traded, packaged, resold, etc., since they have inherent value, and since those owning them want to buy/sell them, perhaps before maturity date. This ""liquidity"" (ability to sell your goods) is necessary - fewer would purchase an item if they could not sell it when they desire. Thus bonds are bought, sold, and traded, and their prices fluctuate based on what the market thinks they are worth, just like any good.  Now, the Fed can buy/sell these bonds on the *open market*, like anyone else. So when the Fed wishes to increase the money supply, they can buy bonds that are not ""spendable"" money and inject money into the system. Note they now hold a bond that had at the time of transaction the same value as the money they injected. Note investors freely bought these from Treasury, meaning the market thought at the time of purchase that this was a good invesement. It is *not* the government merely wishing more money into existance. It is market forces that require more money for trades and is selling goods from the marketplace of (presumably) equal value to the Fed. This increases liquidity, but takes valuable assets from circulation. When the Fed wishes to shrink the money supply, they sell these bonds back into circulation basically by offering better terms than Treasury. In fact, you can find graphs of the Fed operations and see how every December they inject money for more Christmas shpping (need more coupons for more trade) and every January they extract some.  So open market transactions, buying and selling goods at market prices in the marketplace along with other traders, is how the Fed injects and removes money from the money supply. This is the primary mechanism that the Fed uses to control the number of coupons in the economy.  Finally, a little about reserve requirements and the money multiplier, since it affects so much of the number of coupons in play. This also I must simplify drastically. Each bank needs to hold 1/10 of all deposits in cash. The rest can be lent, which lands in another bank, which again can be lent, etc... Thus each $1 deposited can result in loans totalling 9/10 + (9/10)^2 + (9/10)^3 +... = 9 more dollars. Many people claim that banks are printing money, which is nonsense, since each also has an equal debt to pay to the person they borrowed from. When all loans are paid back there is no net money gain.  However, this allows for each $1 the Fed injects by buying bonds for there to be up to $9 in the economy, *if banks all loan to the fullest extent*. Banks tend to want to loan since loaned money makes them profit. Banks used to loan too much and runs on the banks caused significant problems, which is why laws were made to require *all* banks to have the same reserve requirement.  Now, when banks get scared and stop loaning, this 9 fold multiplier dries up, and the Fed has much less inpact on being able to target the proper number of coupons to keep the economy smooth. During the recent crash when banks stopped loaning, as each dollar was paid back on debts, there was significant shrinkage of available money for transactions, and this kills the economy. This is the ""liquidity crisis"".   Hope this helps. As I said, this is vastly simplified and I cannot go into all the reasons and historical items needed to understand it fully. It is a vastly complex (and necessarily so) and takes significant study to grasp the genius of it. It's similar to not being able to understand nuances of particle physics in one go, but as you study and work at it you see *why* things go as they do, and you learn all the failed methods (the gold standard is one example) that were thrown out for many good reasons.  Cheers." "In a comment you say,  if the market crashes, doesn't ""regress to the mean"" mean that I should still expect 7% over the long run? That being the case, wouldn't I benefit from intentionally unbalancing my portfolio and going all in on equities? I can can still rebalance using new savings. No.  Regress to the mean just tells you that the future rate is likely to average 7%.  The past rate and the future rate are entirely unconnected.  Consider a series:   The running average is  That running average is (slowly) regressing to the long term mean without ever a member of the series being above 7%.   Real markets actually go farther than this though.  Real value may be increasing by 7% per year, but prices may move differently.  Then market prices may revert to the real value.  This happened to the S&P 500 in 2000-2002.  Then the market started climbing again in 2003.  In your system, you would have bought into the falling markets of 2001 and 2002.  And you would have missed the positive bond returns in those years.  That's about a -25% annual shift in returns on that portion of your portfolio.  Since that's a third of your portfolio, you'd have lost 8% more than with the balanced strategy each of those two years.   Note that in that case, the market was in an over-valued bubble.  The bubble spent three years popping and overshot the actual value.  So 2003 was a good year for stocks.  But the three year return was still -11%.  In retrospect, investors should have gone all in on bonds before 2000 and switched back to stocks for 2003.  But no one knew that in 2000.  People in the know actually started backing off in 1998 rather than 2000 and missed out on the tail end of the bubble.   The rebalancing strategy automatically helps with your regression to the mean.  It sells expensive bonds and buys cheaper stocks on average.  Occasionally it sells modest priced bonds and buys over-priced stocks.  But rarely enough that it is a better strategy overall.   Incidentally, I would consider a 33% share high for bonds.  30% is better.  And that shouldn't increase as you age (less than 30% bonds may be practical when you are young enough).  Once you get close to retirement (five to ten years), start converting some of your savings to cash equivalents.  The cash equivalents are guaranteed not to lose value (but might not gain much).  This gives you predictable returns for your immediate expenses.  Once retired, try to keep about five years of expenses in cash equivalents.  Then you don't have to worry about short term market fluctuations.  Spend down your buffer until the market catches back up.   It's true that bonds are less volatile than stocks, but they can still have bad years.  A 70%/30% mix of stocks/bonds is safer than either alone and gives almost as good of a return as stocks alone.  Adding more bonds actually increases your risk unless you carefully balance them with the right stocks.  And if you're doing that, you don't need simplistic rules like a 70%/30% balance." Depends on how urgent your need for the emergency savings might be. If the money market account allows you to get your money in the same amount of time as the savings account then there is no real downside, but if the account takes a few days for you to access and you need your money sooner then you probably shouldn't. Also money market accounts DO give more interest than most savings accounts, but the interest rates are generally still pretty low, so it might be an improvement, but probably not a huge one The literal answer to your question is that a number of different types of mutual funds did not have significant downturns in 2008. Money Market Funds are intended to always preserve capital. VMMXX made 2.77% in 2008. It was a major scandal broke the buck, that its holders took a 3% loss. Inverse funds, which go up when the market goes down, obviously did well that year (RYARX), but if you have a low risk tolerance, that's obviously not what you're looking for. (and they have other problems as well when held long-term) But you're a 24-year-old talking about your retirement funds, you should have a much longer time horizon, at least 30 years. Over a period that long, stocks have never had negative real (inflation-adjusted) returns, dating back at least to the civil war. If you look at the charts here or here, you can see that despite the risk in any individual year, as the period grows longer, the average return for the period gets tighter and tighter. If you look at the second graph here, you see that 2011 was the first time since the civil war that the trailing 30-year return on t-bills exceeded that for stocks, and 1981-2011 was period that saw bond yields drop almost continuously, leading to steady rise in bond prices. Although past performance is no guarantee of future results, everything we've seen historically suggests that the risk of a broad stock-market portfolio held for 30 years is not that large, and it should make up the bulk of your holdings. For example, Vanguard's Target retirement 2055 fund is 90% in stocks (US + international), and only 10% in bonds. By all measures, the U.S. stock market is currently frothy. The apparent stability of the world financial system is superficial – financial asset prices are not real, the equilibrium is temporary, the lack of volatility is a trap, and when the whole thing goes haywire, there will truly be hell to pay. Low volatility trading tends to be a hallmark of the late summer as Wall Street by and large goes on summer vacation. When all those traders and hedge fund managers return to work full-tilt in September,  the market tends to become more volatile - either upwards or downwards. If you are wondering why these months have been particularly poor relative to others, than I don't think anyone knows the reason why.