Think of how important your retirement savings are. You can't afford to make many big mistakes -- especially as the years go by and you accumulate substantial sums of money in your tax-deferred retirement plans.

One common mistake among risk-averse investors is to seek safety at the expense of growth. Putting all your money in a money market fund may keep it safe from volatility, but it won't help you stay ahead of inflation. You'll need to achieve growth in your plan. On the other hand, taking too much risk by choosing volatile investments is just as unwise, especially for people who are already retired or who plan to retire soon.

Smart retirement plan investing requires you to look at your individual situation so that you can properly balance safety with growth potential. And while the costliest mistakes are usually related to plan investments, you can make other mistakes that can create a royal mess.

Avoid these 8 mistakes:
1. Managing investments in isolation
2. Putting the wrong investments in taxable vs. tax-deferred accounts
3. Not taking advantage of employer matching contributions
4. Ignoring high fees
5. Not filing IRS Form 8606 with nondeductible IRAs
6. Believing you can't touch the principal in retirement
7. Assuming that using net unrealized appreciation is always the best option
8. Failing to update beneficiaries on your forms

"When they are cryin'" goes the old trading saw, "you should be buyin'."

Easier said than done, reply the legions of stock traders looking at a Dow Jones that is off this morning by more than 190 points, and a Nasdaq nose-diving by more than 75. This, to be blunt, is what makes trading difficult. Not the set-ups, not the systems, not the technique -- heck, we'll give you the set-ups, the systems, the techniques in our TradingMarkets Path to Professional Trading course.

No, what makes trading difficult is a lot like what makes life, sometimes, difficult: finding the discipline to do what you know you SHOULD do when the time comes to do it.

Sometimes I wonder if people who aren't familiar with the TradingMarkets approach to trading read articles like my recent "Four Bullish Bets for Traders" and expect to see four stocks soaring to new highs. That's usually what people think about when they think about "bullish bets."

The only problem is that stocks that look like that are likely not bullish bets for TODAY. They were somebody else's bullish bets, days ago, bets made when the stocks probably did not look anywhere near as "bullish" as they do when they are moving aggressively higher.

I've said it before: traders are never more bullish when their stocks are moving higher. That is understandable, but it can be counter-productive when traders are looking to establish positions in stocks