• 1992-2006, >75% of all day-traders quit w/i 2 years
• Negative Aggregate performance of all traders over 15-years.
• Only 1 out of 100 day traders earned profits over time
What's so pernicious from a trader's perspective is: YOU CAN MAKE MONEY DAY-TRADING!!! but the odds are you will give it back plus most of your starting capital. Greed only sees the all-caps teaser while ignoring the lower-case reality.
See this US example:
Individual investors pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading. From 1991 to 1996, of 66,465 household with discount brokerage trading accounts, those trading the most earned 11.4%/year vs 17.9% for the market's returns
Nope, you are not Bill Ackman either. Or Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, Stevie Cohen, or Ken Griffin.
Maybe you are a good or even a great trader, but before you try to find that out, you should at least know how much the odds are stacked against you.
Criticisms of trading as all luck are off base; It is very hard to consistently make money
I believe the odds of becoming a high schooler becoming a professional athlete are similar to that of a day trader becoming a successful professional trader.
"There is a basic, fundamental foundation upon which all economics is built: everything has a cost. There is no free lunch. Everything has a cost, at times, it can be hidden from view."
FOMC seems 2b always behind the curve, historically, going back to the 1990s under Greenspan.
They are a big + boring conservative institution & are fearful of error. They tend to be less aggressive when making decisions, with significant ramifications.
Consider the errors of just the past 2 decades and you can see the biggest mistake they make is either arriving way too late to the party or once they are there, overstaying their welcome:
1. Only 5 stocks driving markets 2. Recession is inevitable 3. Breadth is terrible 4. AI is a bubble 5. Debt ceiling = disaster 6. Problematic new lows 7. Consumers running out of money 8. Earnings will fail THIS Q 9. HH Debt! 10. Rally faltering
Let's see if I can find something to undercut each of those 10 items:
Only 5 stocks driving markets?
Then why are Equal-weighted indices doing so well?
What drives market returns? These rolling 10-year total returns going back to 1909 (via Crestmont Research) show an average ~10% annual total return over any 10-year long period.
Ed Easterling (of Crestmont) breaks down those returns into these components: EPS, Dividend Yield, and P/E Increase (or decrease).
Note how cyclical P/E expansion/contraction is...
This is why it is important to include whether P/Es are expanding or contracting in any definition of a bull or bear market.
It takes the Earth 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes + 9.76 seconds to complete 1 orbit – to return to the exact same place relative to the sun. Our planet has done this about 4.54 billion times.
What does this unit of time have to do with investing?
Alas, utterly nothing...
This is an example of the irrelevant nature of the calendar - I'd be curious to see what the data looks like for successive rolling 12-month periods rather than calendar years; it might also be more useful than using January - December periods