> it isn't a zero-sum game, where you have winners and losers
Seems like someone who bought any time since last August and wanted to sell now would be a loser, right? Is now a good time to buy? What if the tarriff horrorshow continues and Apr 2 looks like a cakewalk? Should I put off buying until some time later?
I hate all of this and want to spend my time any way else. So, I do.
> someone who bought any time since last August and wanted to sell now would be a loser, right? Is now a good time to buy?
The parent is talking about longer term investing, about buying and holding diversified indexes for 10+ years.
Statistically, if you bought and held the S&P 500 for ~30 years, any day since its inception was a good day to buy.
So yes, last august was a good time to buy. Now is a good time to buy.
What the parent is talking about is the way of investing where you do not spend any real time on it.
The bare minimum time is to just setup an autoinvest in vanguard to buy some dollar amount of a broad index fund (like VFIAX) each month, and then never look at it again until you're ready to retire, or have to make a down payment or such.
When you take out money, you don't try to time that either, you just accept the rate is what it is at the time you sell, and only sell the amount you need.
And then, finally, if you want to not think about it much, hardly spend any time, but be slightly more diversified, you could do a 3-fund portfolio, setup autoinvest, and then adjust the autoinvest once a year to push it towards the desired balance. That's a few hours of initial setup time (reading Boggleheads wiki, setting up accounts and auto-invest), and then maybe 1 hour each year from then on (checking rough percent, adjusting auto-invest numbers to push more money towards anything that's lower than desired).
as long as you don't sell during this period, the exact time you buy should wash out? 30 years from now it won't really matter that much how efficient your monthly payment was in a particular year is the strategy
Like I said, I already have a retirement account that is doing this. I just keep the rest in high interest savings and CDs or whatever and not care about this stock market junk at all.
Seems like someone who bought any time since last August and wanted to sell now would be a loser, right? Is now a good time to buy? What if the tarriff horrorshow continues and Apr 2 looks like a cakewalk? Should I put off buying until some time later?
I hate all of this and want to spend my time any way else. So, I do.