Should i sell my American Mutual Fund??

My question is this, i started with 30,000 bucks in the Growth fund of America with American Mutual Funds and i have lost over 5,000 dollars recently.. should i sell, keep it, or just quit the stock market all together?? please help...

Everyone's going to have a different opinion but one thing's forsure. You won't do well bouncing from product to product over the long run.

do u need any of that in the next 2-3 years? if no then just let it ride this out..

right now we know slow growth but not officially in recession yet (blame the media for all the sell-offs)

i lost over 5000 in value this month and I sold half of my stock that still has some gain to prepare for the worst, also trying to reallocate liquidity so i have more cash to set on the side to jump in later when we have bottom.. especially with VISA ipo coming up this year.

A difficult question to answer. Certainly a 5k loss is disconcerting, but mutual funds in general were not intended for short term gains. Without a minimum of a 5 year investment horizon, you should not be investing in them. American Funds is a superb fund company. They have low expenses and reasonably good investment result, or at least they have in the past.

We certainly may be in for some rough sledding ahead, I must admit that. But you did pay a 5.75% load to get into these funds or thereabouts. That alone is almost 1/2 of the 5000 so your real loss is not really so great. During 2001 and 2002 Growth Fund suffered a 35% decline and it took 3 more years to recover. Growth funds are really not for the faint of heart. A fund more suitable perhaps in your case might be Income Fund, which is not nearly so volitile. During the 2001 and 2002 sell off Income Fund actually increased in value!!! Although it did suffer a very slight set back in 2002, about 4%. AMRMX is considerably less volitile than Growth but still more so than Income. If you are having difficulty coping with this, and I can understand how one might, one option to consider is transferring your holding in Growth to Income to reduce the volitility. That way you will not be out the 5.75% you paid to get in to begin with.