Where do your tendencies lie within the realm of hope, fear and greed? It is imperative that you do some soul searching to determine the answer to this question, especially with regard to managing your long-term investments.

Hope

Hope is generally a good emotion to have, but it can be very dangerous and imprudent when it comes to investing.

Viewing your long-term investments through the rose-colored glasses of hope can cause you to embrace a futile non-strategy that will fail miserably.

Embracing hope in your general approach to long-term investments is an outright denial of reality.

Raw price data and current trends relative to your cost-basis and strategic objectives are the only variables that you should consider if you wish to effectively manage your long-term investments.

The personal responsibilities associated with strategic management protocols are easy to dismiss when you rely on hope. This emotion can cause you to make the dangerously false assumption that everything will turn out all right in the end. The speed with which many investors embrace hope is a testament to its deceptive and seductive allure.

Hope is an extremely dangerous and highly speculative strategy for investing your life savings over the long haul. You must constantly remind yourself that numbers and trends don't lie to ensure you don't buy and hold an investment in the hopes that it will become a long-term success at some point in the future.

It's time to reassess your options and take appropriate action when the original long-term trend supporting your investment decisions changes. This strategy is a far better alternative than simply hoping that things will eventually improve. Hope is a type of denial that you should avoid like the plague.

Fear

Many analysts believe fear is the strongest of the three emotions that influence investors. Extreme levels of fear spawn panic, which rarely produces a desirable outcome. Fear of missing the extraordinary profits everyone else seems to be making in a bull market often triggers a sense of panic to join the party when it is imprudent to do so without explicit strategic contingencies.

Fear can also paralyze you into remaining with a losing position for longer than you should. Allowing this emotion to control your investment strategy will destroy you. Extreme fear will fill you with an intense desire to eliminate this emotion, which can compel you to exit your investment at the worst possible time. Selling out too early or too late due to fear can cause you to suffer unnecessary losses.

Greed

Greed is an emotion that is inherent to the human condition, probably because of the survival-based hoarding tendencies of our nomadic ancestors. Greed in the modern world is largely irrational, especially when it comes to managing long-term investments.

The ridiculous expectation of buying in at the very bottom of a price trend or selling out at the very top of the trend is a common example of irrational greed in the modern sense. Long-term investors often cling to this expectation even when they record respectable profits.

These unenlightened investors somehow feel cheated if they fail to exit their positions with a maximum profit. The problem with this thinking is that it requires the investor to guess the time and price at the very peak of open-trade equity during the course of an ongoing long-term investment campaign. Such expectations are simply foolish.

Striving greedily to achieve such impossible tasks will ruin an otherwise productive strategy and wreak havoc on the performance of your long-term investments. Submitting to greed and deviating from a prudent investment strategy is another recipe for unmitigated disaster based on emotion.

You cannot manage your investments without the combination of a sound strategy and emotional discipline. Sound strategy and emotion discipline engender rational behavior. Rational behavior empowers you to earn money investing over the long haul.

The response I most often get when discussing some of the intractable challenges that will inevitably challenge and disrupt global and national economies is one of clear denial. People often reply that life won't be worth living if things ever get that bad. They also say that everyone will be in the same boat anyway, so why should they plan for any contingencies to cope with these plausible challenges.

I understand the nature of such denials, but I don't understand why it's so hard for most investors to take simple measures that would benefit them regardless of future economic outcomes.

Assume for the moment that we knew with absolute certainty the world was going to end in 55 months. What would most of us do? We would probably quit our jobs, focus on our family and friends, spend every penny we had and max out every credit card in our possession, if we didn't panic and immediately begin killing one another. We would also race to fill our bucket lists before that fateful day arrived!

Sadly, this mindset also describes how politicians view their political careers. It also explains why they tend to spend and redistribute taxpayers' money like there's no tomorrow.

Let's be realistic; the world will end only once, and not for hundreds of thousands of years. You'll probably be spending a lot of time on Earth before you die. Your responsibilities in your investment strategy require you to strike an appropriate balance between spending and saving. The effective self-management of your life savings is one of the most important of these responsibilities.

Hope, fear and greed not only cause long-term investors to over-react to short-term events, they cause denial and wild speculation. These emotions often create dogmas that convince naïve investors to adopt an unshakable faith in a preordained future with religious fervor. These investors believe that the future will bring whatever they want most, rather than what is actually happening according to current prices and trends.

In every great bull market, the music eventually stops, a chair pulled, and many long-term investors are hurt in the resulting panic.

A Strategy for Every Season

The Guardian Revere Long-Term Trend Monitor uses a long-term investment strategy to break the destructive cycles of hope, fear and greed. This service supplies action alerts that provide you with advance notice and a clear heads-up reminder of your personal responsibility in exercising strategic protocols appropriately. These tools will help serve your best interests in growing and preserving your life savings over the long haul.

Click here for graphics that will assist you in answering critical questions to help you determine the suitability of this simple, effective solution for achieving your long-term investment goals.