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Baddog posted:We had plenty of time to react to this event. Expert consensus for 6+ weeks has been that this was uncontainable and there would be widespread transmission in the US (and the world). We could see that China shutdown everything, and we know how that would impact the global economy. With a bit of foresight, we could also envision what would happen when the US needed to do the same thing. You're trying really hard to get validation for your decisions, but this thread isn't the place for it. We're not here to dip our money in and out. We accumulate over a period of 20-30 years the same way day in and day out. We do it because it works. If you're putting enough in and you know roughly how much you need, why would you complicate things? Actually, let's get your answer to that: why do you want to complicate the process?
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Mar 17, 2020 19:09
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It's actually very simple: buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point. Not sure why this requires so much debate.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:11
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Why were we supposed to react to these events, exactly? Is the market literally never going to recover? Is it different this time? Will I have less money 30 years from now than any other 30 year period? How do you know?
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Mar 17, 2020 19:13
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skipdogg posted:Seriously. If you got out at 28k and got back In today neither of those was perfect are you saying someone that did that isn’t better off?
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Mar 17, 2020 19:21
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He suggested to "wait a few weeks" on investing in response to analysis, based on widely reported news, that there may be a major global economic impact due to a pandemic. If you're truly a long-term investor with a 30-year horizon, and believe that analysis, why fret about waiting a few weeks to invest? Seems like you can wait-and-see on that timeframe. Note, I said a few weeks, not a few years. Further, if you have confidence in your reading of world events, why not act on it? Let's say you literally had foreknowledge that there would be a nuclear bomb going off in NYC in 1 week. "Is the market literally never going to recover?" Nah, it will recover, on a 30-year time horizon, unless it's a prelude to a global nuclear holocaust. Either way, I'd be fine with selling most my stocks and waiting a few weeks. This thread generally gives good advice for normal times but man, it's a little dogmatic.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:22
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withak posted:It's actually very simple: buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point. Not sure why this requires so much debate. You can't buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point without the benefit of hindsight. Buying all the way down, and all the back way up is the most effective way to capitalize on all the gains. This isn't the casino thread.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:22
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acidx posted:You can't buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point without the benefit of hindsight. Buying all the way down, and all the back way up is the most effective way to capitalize on all the gains. This isn't the casino thread. in fact, this thread is so dogmatic, that people can't recognize sarcasm or satire anymore
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Mar 17, 2020 19:24
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acidx posted:You can't buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point without the benefit of hindsight. Buying all the way down, and all the back way up is the most effective way to capitalize on all the gains. This isn't the casino thread. You can google some graphs, the peaks and valleys are usually pretty obvious.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:25
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Some of us don’t want to wait 30 more years until retirement.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:26
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pmchem posted:
Because time in the market is more important than timing the market. pmchem posted:
How do you know to wait a few weeks and not days, months, or years? What's your signal to stop waiting? pmchem posted:This thread generally gives good advice for normal times but man, it's a little dogmatic. Don't mistake discipline for dogma. The advice in this thread is more important during abnormal times than it is in normal times.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:29
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pmchem posted:in fact, this thread is so dogmatic, that people can't recognize sarcasm or satire anymore Sarcasm and satire only work when they're distinguishable from what other people are saying in complete earnest.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:30
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H110Hawk posted:
dexter6 posted:Every time I see Pollyanna post my heart gets warm Yeah. Like I’m still trying to figure out how this active trading poo poo works with my small-money E*TRADE account and I continue to not get it. It seems much less reliable than just long-term buy-and-hold. poo poo like that is the main reason why I avoided the stick market for so long, it makes my brain hurt.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:36
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Recent thread conversion / success story we managed to 
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etrade is terrible, FYI. And yes, much much riskier investments are far less reliable than lower risk investments.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:37
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withak posted:It's actually very simple: buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point. Not sure why this requires so much debate. Can't find that awesome "buy low, sell high" graph where instead of happening at the min and max, they buy just after the min and sell just after the max, because they realize that you can't perfectly time the market.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:40
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pmchem posted:He suggested to "wait a few weeks" on investing in response to analysis, based on widely reported news, that there may be a major global economic impact due to a pandemic. If you did this every time an economic downturn is predicted based on widely reported news, over the long run you would significantly underperform just staying in the market. Have we already forgotten the thread's previous title? Personally, I do agree that dogmatic beliefs can be a problem in a lot of goon spaces, and considering situations critically on a case by case is important. That's not the problem here though.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:43
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Yes, I have found that to be a problem. People who predict things rarely step forward to post their wrong predictions. I mean, it's not hard to make a prediction about everything, and then when 20% of them work out, say, "This was obvious, I told everyone but no one listened!" If people posted their wrong predictions, our lord and savior Donald J. Trump would be here to post, "Hoax. I told you dummies, it was obvious."
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Mar 17, 2020 19:46
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bird with big dick posted:If you got out at 28k and got back In today neither of those was perfect are you saying someone that did that isn’t better off? The market could've just as easily turned around and headed right back up upon some good news, and he would've sold at the bottom. Also, if he decided stop making contributions while he waits for "the bottom," he could end up missing out on a big chunk of the recovery that costs him the benefits he got from selling early. And even if it all worked out great this time, if he starts making it a habit to pull all of his money out and reinvest it later to try and time the market, he will at some point get his rear end handed to him, which will knock out his gains and then some. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the people who made consistent contributions through all the peaks and valleys will average out ahead. nelson posted:Some of us don’t want to wait 30 more years until retirement. Mmhm. You go ahead and invest in one of the 80% or so of mutual funds out there that underperform the market, or better yet, start actively managing the money yourself. I'm sure you'll be in position to retire much sooner than the rest of us.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:48
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nelson posted:Some of us don’t want to wait 30 more years until retirement. How do you expect to for sure make enough money to retire on in less than 30 years?
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Mar 17, 2020 19:49
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timn posted:If you did this every time an economic downturn is predicted based on widely reported news, over the long run you would significantly underperform just staying in the market. Have we already forgotten the thread's previous title? His post was made on Feb. 29 in response to a specific, ongoing international crisis. Not some economist looking at whatever macro indicators and predicting a general top on a markov chain. He could have been wrong, but, he recommended a short-term action (weeks) and it was based on a real crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns#Lockdowns (Hubei has ~58m people) quote:13 February 2020, the Chinese government has issued extension of order to shut down all non-essential companies, including manufacturing plants, in Hubei Province until at least 24:00 20 February. If someone wants to take short-term actions to mitigate risk based on that news, it's an investment decision that should be rationally analyzed, and not just blown off with "don't time the market".
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Mar 17, 2020 19:50
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pmchem posted:If someone wants to take short-term actions to mitigate risk based on that news, it's an investment decision that should be rationally analyzed, and not just blown off with "don't time the market".
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Mar 17, 2020 19:52
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Baddog posted:We had plenty of time to react to this event. Expert consensus for 6+ weeks has been that this was uncontainable and there would be widespread transmission in the US (and the world). We could see that China shutdown everything, and we know how that would impact the global economy. With a bit of foresight, we could also envision what would happen when the US needed to do the same thing. you still don't understand This is not the "marking timing extravaganza: buy low sell high" thread. This is the "park your money and don't worry because in 30 years it won't loving matter" thread. If you actually, truly believe that we are on the cusp of global catastrophe, then none of this matters for poo poo. You should withdraw all your money and go out and buy guns, ammo, and MREs to stock up your underground bunker. In reality, the dollars you "missed" by not panic selling will be only a small portion of your retirement fund in 30 years. It's worth the sacrifice in order to maintain a discipline of not panic selling every time the market hiccups. The unfortunate lesson of being right once in a while is that it convinces you that you'll always be right. Yes, you called it, good for you. If you think nobody in this thread anticipated this, then you're wrong. We all saw this coming from a mile away. But it doesn't change anything, because over the long term this is just a blip on the radar. edit: this all goes back to the fact that if you could reliably predict the movements of the market and buy/sell accordingly, then you wouldn't be here discussing it. Instead of trying to justify your foreign condo hedge plan, you'd be trying to decide which of your private islands to fly to this week. DaveSauce fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Mar 17, 2020 |
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Mar 17, 2020 19:58
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pmchem posted:His post was made on Feb. 29 in response to a specific, ongoing international crisis. Not some economist looking at whatever macro indicators and predicting a general top on a markov chain. He could have been wrong, but, he recommended a short-term action (weeks) and it was based on a real crisis. Did he take the same action when the SARS outbreak started? How about the swine flu epidemic? Bird flu? The rational analysis here is that early indicators can look really important and then wind up not being important in retrospect, or also wind up being obvious in retrospect. And, I feel like a broken record here: this is the long-term investment and retirement thread. Plenty of us read and post in the stock gambling thread too; it's appropriate to discuss shorter-term investing there.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:02
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Leperflesh posted:Did he take the same action when the SARS outbreak started? How about the swine flu epidemic? Bird flu? I dunno, did China lockdown 58m people and nuke its economy in an entire province for months in response to any of those events?
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Mar 17, 2020 20:05
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I'll go ahead and state for the record that (by my understanding) the goal of retirement investing is "reaching your asset goal prior to your intended retirement date." You can do that by throwing every spare dollar you have into the market, or by trying to get clever with what assets you invest in, or by trying to suss out good times to buy and sell, etc. There are a million strategies. The simplest, most cost-effective, and least troubling one is to consistently put money into index funds on a fixed schedule with an estimation of the expected rate of return over X years for money invested via that asset allocation, and then don't do anything else. The thread is real big on this strategy, because it's low stress, low cost, and requires very little brainpower. I can't speak for everybody, but I'm interested in achieving a balance between my retirement savings process and living my life. That means I don't want to spend more time, money, or thought on it than is necessary to succeed. What I keep asking here is, "Why are you suggesting anybody needs to put additional thought into this process beyond the Basic Strategy?" Do you believe that failure to react to this event means we'll fail to hit our retirement savings goals in 10, 20, 30 years? "Don't time the market," is about trying to pull people away from overthinking what is ultimately a very simple process. There is absolutely a ton of nuance there if you want to play with it, but our own psychology is the enemy here when it comes to successfully hitting our retirement savings goals. The more clever somebody tries to get, the more likely they are to fail. Maybe you're smarter than that, maybe you make more money, that's fantastic. Is the extra money worth the extra risk you take on in fiddling with the formula? We'll never know whether that ends up truly being the case or you just got completely lucky. And in the end I don't think it's a worthwhile way to invest your time.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:10
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pmchem posted:If someone wants to take short-term actions to mitigate risk based on that news, it's an investment decision that should be rationally analyzed, and not just blown off with "don't time the market". You do that using a put option. Which were very cheap on that date and have accumulated well I don't have a total but I've sold some SPY puts for 400% profit so probably over 1,000% easily so you don't need to buy all that much to use as insurance. Only buy enough to break even if you plan to use it as insurance If you want to use it to profit on the downside because you are pretty sure it's coming then over buy. Don't pull out your life savings to make the bet. I didn't touch my retirement to play the market, but playing the market is very time consuming, you probably don't want to spend the required time to research enough to take positions. Recommending leave it in an Index fund for 30 years is sound advice and works every time. You need to pay the gently caress attention for anything else to work and also need to know when to back off or you will lose any advantage over an invest and hold strategy. pixaal fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Mar 17, 2020 |
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Mar 17, 2020 20:10
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah. Like I’m still trying to figure out how this active trading poo poo works with my small-money E*TRADE account and I continue to not get it. It seems much less reliable than just long-term buy-and-hold. poo poo like that is the main reason why I avoided the stick market for so long, it makes my brain hurt. No you get it.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:12
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The stick market, where you buy a stick to beat yourself over the head with, and come out with more money than daytrading in the stock market.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:20
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Pollyanna posted:The stick market, where you buy a stick to beat yourself over the head with, and come out with more money than daytrading in the stock market. I like this as a new thread title
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Mar 17, 2020 20:27
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Pollyanna posted:Don’t time the market. I don't understand why you say this but ask frequently about timing the market in the Stock Trading thread. Edit: Ok ok maybe its to learn what not to do
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Mar 17, 2020 20:30
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Waiting a "few weeks" to continue my 401k contribution is pointless. You analyze your risk and your time for it. 31 years until I can realistically access that money. So buy stocks and hold as normal.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:30
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FateFree posted:I don't understand why you say this but ask frequently about timing the market in the Stock Trading thread.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:30
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FateFree posted:I don't understand why you say this but ask frequently about timing the market in the Stock Trading thread. I want it to work, it’d be nice to find a way to get money fast and easy. But in all my investigation, I have found nothing.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:31
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You can be a responsible investor with your savings and also have some fun with your disposable income, IMHO. No need for the posters of each thread to be mutually exclusive like it's the Console Wars or something.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:33
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Oh I don’t begrudge anybody for it. Trying to find workarounds and shortcuts is normal for humans. It’s just not very...convincing, I guess is the word.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:34
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pmchem posted:I dunno, did China lockdown 58m people and nuke its economy in an entire province for months in response to any of those events? To their detriment, the Chinese response to SARS was a lot worse, and was one of the key reasons that China was willing, this year, to lock down an entire province and nuke its entire economy. That COVID-19 turned out to be more lethal is significant, of course. But if you saw the outbreak of SARS in early 2003, you could easily have drawn the same conclusion that the whole world was about to see a huge deadly pandemic, but add on that China wasn't going to (and didn't) shut it down effectively. look at this timeline. A long-term investor following this idea could easily have started buying puts etc. in anticipation of a global pandemic in March 2003. And here's what I might say is the inflection point: quote:April 4: The number of suspected U.S. SARS cases was 115; reported from 29 states. There were no deaths among these suspect cases of SARS in the United States. Here's the S&P500 for that period:  It's easy to look at global news and say "woah, poo poo's going down with some kinda new disease in China" and decide OK time to go buy some puts and bet against the market; but the fact is, that's still gambling, not a sure thing. Maybe Baddog is an expert on epidemics, but most of us aren't, and it's super dangerous to tell people "well this one was obvious" afterwards without also looking at your history of making predictions and seeing if you can consistently call the "obvious ones" in a way that other people can repeat; and for that matter, explaining why the whole market isn't also calling those super obvious ones at the same time you are. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's not good advice for the long-term investing and retirement thread people who really should not be looking at news articles discussing new disease outbreaks and deciding to short the whole market with puts on that basis.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:46
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I still maintain that there’s long-term investing and short-term speculation. I don’t think there’s short-term investing, because predictable behavior just doesn’t work on the short-term timescale.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:49
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Hoodwinker posted:I'll go ahead and state for the record that (by my understanding) the goal of retirement investing is "reaching your asset goal prior to your intended retirement date." You can do that by throwing every spare dollar you have into the market, or by trying to get clever with what assets you invest in, or by trying to suss out good times to buy and sell, etc. There are a million strategies. The simplest, most cost-effective, and least troubling one is to consistently put money into index funds on a fixed schedule with an estimation of the expected rate of return over X years for money invested via that asset allocation, and then don't do anything else. The thread is real big on this strategy, because it's low stress, low cost, and requires very little brainpower. This is a reasonable post and I agree with most of your points. However, someone may want take a retirement goal (in total funds or timeline) and be more aggressive, or conservative. Reality might not be "hit $X by $DATE", be actually be better described as "hit $<RANGE> by $DATE". The distribution of $RANGE affects the strategy. This adds complications. It adds nuance. If someone wants to deal with that nuance, it's easy to respond with canned advice. Instead, in my opinion, it would be great to engage the poster with (y)our best analysis of their goals, motivations, and the situation at hand. Sometimes the answer will still be "nah, invest as previously planned, and by the way don't time the market." That's fine, if it follows the analysis. Sometimes it might be "adjust your short-term plans", "change your strategy entirely", or "just rebalance", "go buy a lifecycle fund", etc. Often we'll all be wrong, but, to me, there is value to be gained (non-monetary at the least!) in trying and learning. Let's not shut out the nuance.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:52
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Pollyanna posted:How do you expect to for sure make enough money to retire on in less than 30 years? Wait until people start dying then buy.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:55
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Just did babby's first tax-loss harvesting (or technically I will have in 5 minutes when Vanguard actually processes my orders) and good God even if you know it's the right thing to do, it's terrifying to actually hit that Submit button for what is essentially your largest asset. Anyway, for the purposes of avoiding wash sales, I'm safe turning off just Dividend Reinvestment, right? Or do I need to also turn off Capital Gains reinvestment?
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Mar 17, 2020 20:56
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pmchem posted:This is a reasonable post and I agree with most of your points. However, someone may want take a retirement goal (in total funds or timeline) and be more aggressive, or conservative. Reality might not be "hit $X by $DATE", be actually be better described as "hit $<RANGE> by $DATE". The distribution of $RANGE affects the strategy. This adds complications. It adds nuance. No disagreement there, but that wasn't the tenor or nature of the discussion. It was simply, "The market's going to shut down. You should pull your money out." That's very different from, "I'm retiring in 10 years and I worry that my asset allocation might not get me into a safe asset range. If I'm concerned about a global recession, what can I do to hedge my bets against that?" I know for a fact that the regulars in this thread would have happily had that discussion. The literal words used were, "I'm positive you need to GTFO immediately." That's not an invite to nuanced discussion. Hoodwinker fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Mar 17, 2020 |
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Mar 17, 2020 20:57
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