Investment advice
A Word of Unintuitive Investment Advice.
If you think about it, the whole philosophy to all investment advice boils down to telling you how to buy at a low enough price, and then sell when the prices look up. But somehow, nailing the right time, is nearly impossible – especially at a time like last year when the markets were on a roller coaster – on its way into an abyss. Even the conservative mutual fund market, had such a hard time finding the right times to buy and sell last year, they actually did more poorly than the Standard & Poor’s index benchmarks.
And it wasn’t just for last year either; this is the way investing in mutual funds and stock markets turns out, if you look at it over a long enough period of time. It’s been like they tell you about casinos – over the long run, the house always wins.
The reason things pan out so badly, is that, the investment in the stock market (or even most mutual fund committees) is mostly dealt on by either an amateur investor or a short-sighted professional whose formulae know no better; and there is hardly anything scientific about the way the amateur investment process goes about its business.
People like that love to buy stocks like they buy cars – if it looks good, and a couple of your friends have it, how bad can it be? They probably haven’t heard of investment advice from the conscientious investors, that recommends investment strategies like asset allocation. These do sound kind of intimidating, but give it a listen, and you’ll know that just about anyone could swing these.
These complicated terms really just mean this: invest regularly in so many different kinds of companies and stocks, that poor performance in no one area will stick it to you that hard. A properly spread-out holding of bonds, stocks and real estate that take the counsel of all kinds of well-recognized indexes, is where you’re supposed to put your money.
What people do usually, is, when they see something going up, they wait for a while to make sure that it does keep going up, and then they buy: when the stock is close to topping out. And then when it heads down, they wait a while to make sure that it really is heading down, and sell when it is near its personal worst in a race to the bottom. This common investment strategy is all about momentum. And if you check with your friends on what to buy, and not an analyst, you tend to get momentum investment advice like this.
A non-intuitive (but valuable) piece of investment advice you need to look into is the one that asks you to invest in stocks that are at their worst. If you are investing for the future, usually it’s the ones that are doing their worst right now, that stand the best chance of improving. Within reason. As perverse as this seems, it does work.
What happens in real life when you try this kind of investment advice?
There are many investment companies like Vanguard, that try to do just this, and their mutual funds have been barely touched by the recession. I actually found that putting your money in a mutual fund that invests half in stocks and bonds, gets you nearly an 8% return annually. Being a little extra partial to the stocks, usually brings you an even better return. In a financial climate where people are losing their shirts, this seems pretty good.
Related posts:
