Unless you are a day trader (aka gambler), "normal person investing" is about trickling cash into an account slowly over time into low-cost funds/etfs, covering the grid, and pretty much never selling until retirement. Maybe a rebalance here or there over the decades, but you're never "out" unless you're paranoid and liquidate into a cash position, but refer to point A.
This is the strategy myself and many of my college friends took when we graduated in the late 80's. And we're all pretty comfy right now. We had a few buds that went all day-trader and they lost their shirts, with one and only one exception.
When the 2008 crashed happened the office I worked in had lots of people take their money out of their 401ks, IRAs, or brokerages for years. In hindsight it may have been irrational but from what I remember, people were scared. Some people lost their job for years (remember the various news stories about 99-week unemployment people?), you needed whatever money you could get. If that meant cashing out everything you had, so be it.
There were other people that weren't fazed by it and obviously had the chance to not miss the "days."
Guessing this type of anecdote may be more common than people think.
Not only more common -- that is effectively what crashes are: demand for liquidity exceeds the supply, and the way markets are set up, this condition causes an even greater demand for liquidity, in a feedback loop.
Most of the time, you can get liquidity, but only at a price that really hurts. Sometimes you can't get it at all.
That makes sense, growing up my parents never contributed or had a 401k and I myself didn't start taking investing or contributing to anything until last year.
> This is the strategy myself and many of my college friends took when we graduated in the late 80's. And we're all pretty comfy right now.
I wonder if your Japanese peers in a Nikkei 225 fund over the same time period would agree with your strategy. Buy-and-hold for them is still down 50% over the last few decades.
Lot of people bring up the Nikkei but averaging in money in was still better than holding cash over a long enough time period. I highly doubt anyone bought at the peak and then never bought again afterwards.
Not if they were slowly and continuously trickling in as the gp suggested. Still Japan is a cautionary counter example to the stock market always goes up.
> Why would expect the Nikkei 225 to provide similar returns to the S&P 500?
Why would you expect them to be different?
> Company quality varies greatly between these indexes.
Can you elaborate on that? Has the "company quality" differed between the two indexes 30 years ago and was the market mispricing it? Is the market pricing these indexes correctly now? Do you think the S&P 500 is going to provide better results than Nikkei 225 going forward?
Japan has a population of 125 million people and is one of the largest economies in the world (3rd / 4th largest depending on if you're using GDP or PPP).
Why wouldn't they have similar companies?
Lots of well known global brands in Glorious Nippon, too.
This is a common misconception. It's so common that I feel it merits a decent explanation -why- it is incorrect. Not to pick on your comment - it was just the first one I saw that mentioned the Nikkei :)
You can't simply look at the price graph of an index or a stock and make judgments. Aside from dividends, companies can do all kinds of wacky things such as special distributions, perform buybacks, issue new stock, pay out class action settlements etc. Oftentimes stock holders can make extra money through stock yield enhancement programs: if I hold a share of Google in my account at Interactive Brokers, and it has a borrow fee of 5%, IB will automatically lend my share out to people who want it, giving me some decent cash on the side. They split this 50/50 between you and them, so if I had 1 share worth $1000 of Google, that'd be 5% * 1 * 1000 = $50/year lending cost, of which I'd get half, or $25 profit. (Worth noting: My share remains mine to do what I want with at all times - the lending doesn't affect me at all.)
Unfortunately it doesn't even stop there. Even the total profit is not a good enough indicator. Imagine a stock market that craters from 2020 to 2030, going from $50 to $20. With dividend reinvestment and other things added, your total account value is $25 in 2030, or half of what you put in. However, in the same time, the cost of living halved. Your investment would buy exactly as much bread, eggs, housing, Netflix etc as it would when you put it in. Was your investment a good one? You still can't know: you'd also want to take a look at things such as other foreign markets, exchange rates, risk, volatility, and alternative types of investments (bonds, housing, land, etc.) I'll ignore those factors for the rest of my comment, but if you want to see data on the Nikkei and CPI, this is great: https://dqydj.com/nikkei-return-calculator-dividend-reinvest...
Anyway, back to Japan. Buying the Nikkei at its absolute peak in 1989 and simply holding it (with dividend reinvestment), never adding a penny to your account, would have produced total returns of 54% in US dollars or 13% in Yen. Still poor returns on an annual basis, yes, but this is with two rather unusual assumptions - 1) buying at the absolute all-time peak way back in the eighties after a to-this-day unprecedented growth spurt, and 2) investing on that one unfortunate day and never putting in another penny. Most people put money in gradually over many years.
Specifically, what the gp comment said was "trickling cash in slowly over time". Assuming you put money in for the decade preceding the 1989 crash, your total returns today would be (by year, investing in December, US dollars):
If you had contributed $1000 per month from '79 to '89 you would have $1.1 million today; if you did the same from '89 to '99 you would have $316k; if you did that from '99 to '09 you'd have $434k.
Over any span of time, if you contributed a few hundred dollars per month to the Nikkei during the length of a typical career, you would be a US dollar millionaire today. I would say his Japanese peers are doing just fine.
My old job 401K was shifting into the new job 401K, so for a week or so my $ was in a check in the mail between companies, and I think I missed like 2% gain. It's semi real $. It's annoying.
This is one reason why paying for a wire transfer, ACATS transfer or other ways to move money faster can make sense: like the top comment said, you lose the top 10 days and you lose half your return.
Unfortunately for a 401k transfer there's no wire or ACATS (or even ACH) options, so you're basically screwed there. As far as I know you're basically forced to wait around for the money to move by check. However, you can insure yourself against the "risk" that the market jumps while you're out of it by using a smaller, separate account and options.
I agree with this except I think if you know a stock or two is good, diversification is unnecessary. I’ve only had two stocks in my portfolio for the last ten years.
All of the available evidence demonstrates that even experienced fund managers with access to extensive, expensive, and focused research on the companies they invest in perform no better on average than VTSAX.
Further, there’s no strategy to find the winning fund managers. The distribution of winners and losers over time seems to be exactly what you’d expect from random chance, and even fund managers who’ve been successful for years have the exact same odds of having their next year be awful as anyone else.
This is a bad analogy. The stock market is not a lottery. It’s a place to buy and sell shares of a company. Most people treat it like a lottery and that can serve you rather than hurt you if you know what you’re doing.
For all the DD you do, there is no predicting the future.
Plus there is a very real incentive for companies to do shady things, e.g. Volkswagon or Enron.
Are you sure those companies you're holding aren't lying out of their ass? Can you prove that? Like, unless you're in the accounting dept. at those firms -- or someone who can otherwise get those numbers -- you can't.
At that point it's gambling. It may be akin to counting cards, where you can make probabilistic guesses, but best case is still uncertain.
Otherwise you're rocking a very special secret, or are manipulating the market. But for the rest of the us stock plebs, is effectively gambling.
I am happy for you that your 2 picks have been good. But most likely you have been lucky (maybe you picked AMZN, TSLA). Modern portfolio theory states that diversification gets you closer to better returns on average with lower risk. [1]
I would say people who picked amzn and Tesla are lucky. The jury is out on amzn. Bezos did something no public company ever did to the extent he did. He put customers before profits in an extreme way. Then, he built another multi billion dollar unit from scratch with AWS. So far, it’s worked out but the PE makes it speculative nonetheless. But the gap is quickly closing making it an investment grade issue. I don’t know so I leave it alone knowing I’ll regret it one day. That’s fine. I stay away unless I’m 95% sure. I would say s&p 500 represents 100% certainty overtime, because if it wasn’t, life as we know it wouldn’t be the same anyway we’d have bigger problems. Tesla is just a dumb gamble. There’s no justification at all for its price and history shows us what can happen with auto stocks.
Ultimately it's about risk (permanent loss) control, and if you've done the research into those couple of companies, have high confidence in their continued success, and are diligent in continuing to update your views, then it sounds like you're managing risk well. There's always the chance of unknown, idiosyncratic, and potentially disruptive factors though--from a financial planning and risk management perspective, even founders are urged to diversify away from their own company's equity eventually, regardless of how successful they are.
Unless you are a day trader (aka gambler), "normal person investing" is about trickling cash into an account slowly over time into low-cost funds/etfs, covering the grid, and pretty much never selling until retirement. Maybe a rebalance here or there over the decades, but you're never "out" unless you're paranoid and liquidate into a cash position, but refer to point A.
This is the strategy myself and many of my college friends took when we graduated in the late 80's. And we're all pretty comfy right now. We had a few buds that went all day-trader and they lost their shirts, with one and only one exception.