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A lot of the adjectives that traders use are different from how casuals would interpret things. They are looking for massive profit opportunities and declare he
by tootie 4y ago
A lot of the adjectives that traders use are different from how casuals would interpret things. They are looking for massive profit opportunities and declare hell on earth when they aren't there because it is for them. People who are just putting 401K money into index funds just need their money to slightly outpace inflation which it will almost always do in a long enough time horizon. We saw an outsize bull market and are now giving up a lot of those gains, but if you just buy and hold, you're nearly guaranteed to come out ahead even if you don't really have much chance of making a killing.
- svachalek 4y ago"Nearly guaranteed" may be a stretch. There are decades in US history where you wouldn't really come out ahead (although I'm not sure any alternatives to stock would have done better) but internationally, there are many clear examples where the stock market hasn't been a good investment on a generational basis, like Japan now. The question is how much do you believe in American exceptionalism, are US markets really immune to this kind of failure forever, or have they just been on a really good run?
- tootie 4y agoThere's an awesome website posted to HN a while back that calculates total real returns (accounting for dividends and inflation). Here's the chart for the Vanguard S&P500 index fund: https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VFINX https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VFINX
- llampx 4y agoQuestion is, will the market be able to make 7-8% p.a. in the face of massive headwinds like QT and rising interest rates and rising inflation from the CRB index.