You're talking about market timing which is incredibly hard (some say impossible) to do over a long period of time. Sure, you might miss the down here (if there is one), but then you also might miss the move back up. There is a saying that time in market is much better than timing the market. If you consistently put money in, you'll naturally also buy the downs. At that point, you just need to periodically rebalance, and with age start to shift to less risky investments.

In investing terms, you're talking about a "less risky" rather than "better" idea. You'll only know if something was better after the event in question has passed.

Passive investing when you have many years before retirement means you worry about long term trends rather than short term risks.

Ah, you see, because the market is famously perfectly efficient, equity and bond markets have already priced in the expected effect of Brexit-Trump. So investing in equities now essentially gets you a discount over what they would have cost had Brexit-Trump not happened.

Whereas (more seriously) investing in "more stable" things like bonds forces you to pay a premium, because every man and his dog has desperately been chasing stability, safety, yield, etc since 2008, in many cases using quantitatively eased money to do so.

while coupons (e.g. the regular payout) might be stable, bonds, too, can fall in value. One interest rate hike by the FED or ECB would send bond prices tumbling.

It depends on the fund. I just did a report on this for one of my classes. https://github.com/wihl/stats107-project/blob/master/writeup...

All the code is in the same repository as R Markdown.

7% in the long term, but with big fluctuations.