But I fear that the vast majority of investors are price speculators, not dividend farmers.
Does it suck seeing the money we just put in there drop? Yes. Though I know I am in it for the long haul, not the get quick rich approach or attempting to time the markets.
Index funds with low expense costs are my personal strategy. While I'd love to retire now (early 30s), my realistic goal is to retire at 59. The plan I have now with moderate ROI allows that - patience while staying the course long-term with your financial plan is key.
Some traditional companies also have lowish dividends, but they will of course compound over time, usually old-fashioned companies like banks or airlines. A good place to look is Warren Buffet's portfolio.
I meant their speculative portfolios will die (probably).
I keep my YOLO options portfolio at 1% of my net worth. Gambling money.
I mean, of course don't try to time the market, but this story only further propagates the lie that everyone(tm) can make money on the stock market without gambling aggressively
Using Robert Shiller's long term stock market data we find that s&p returns without dividend reinvestment is about 2%, after inflation. With dividend reinvestment it's about 6%. That's a 2x difference in 20 years.
Stock buybacks are a thing, and are generally better than dividends for the owners of stock since they can choose whether or not to have a taxable event.
I guess you could argue that maybe the buyback was a bad decision (ie. sacrificing long term gains for short term gains), but the logic could be applied to dividends as well.
Six months or a year later, the business cycle turns a bit causing all stocks to go down, the business environment changes to make the business less attractive (buggy whip manufacturers are no longer a growth industry), an outside event (tariff changes?) costs X money, or X's CEO publicly abuses a service worker causing X to be disliked by the market. In whatever case, the valuation of X which was still about $40/share goes down to $30/share. Or $15/share.
The share price of a stock has essentially no attachment to anything in the real world, and can and will fluctuate according to real-world events, whims, or just randomly.
From investors. At the current market price; i.e. closer to $20/share than $40/share. Keep in mind two things: the person who sold the share doesn't get any further income from that share, unlike a dividend, and the company won't buy back shares if they believe the shares are fairly- or over-valued. They only buy back shares if they think the stock prices is too low.[1]
The buy-back only acts as a "dividend" to those who sell after the buy-back has raised the stock price, not to those who sold into the buy-back.
"Moreover, your shares in the company increased. If you had 1 share to start with, after the buyback you have the equivalent of 2 shares. Your "dividend" is the extra share, which the company bought for you using the cash they would have otherwise paid out."
Uh, are you confusing buy-backs with stock splits? Before the buy-back, you have one stock share. After the buy-back, you have one stock share, which represents a larger share of the corporation's earnings and book value. Bought-back shares disappear[2]. Your "dividend" is the difference in price of that one share before and after the buy-back.
And the price of that share is free floating, moving according to market forces.
[1] In theory. Ideally. They can also do so to manipulate the stock price, the strike price of management options, and other things that are generally bad for investors. Stock buy-backs have a legitimate purpose, to signal to investors that management considers the stock price to be too low. They're not a substitute for dividends.
[2] They go into the company's treasury, where they can be re-sold later to raise money without affecting dilution, IIUC.
As opposed to the money that it used to pay the dividends?
>If the shares were appropriately priced before then each outstanding share is worth about the same after.
Right, but now you paid some number of share holders to exit their positions. It's the equivalent of buying $10 worth of stocks and giving it to you as the "dividend", rather than giving you $10 cash.
Stock prices move based on unexpected information. If you've done your homework on the company's fundamentals, dilution from stock-based compensation has already been factored into earnings per share.
(Bad acquisitions are another matter - a much more common failure mode for dumb companies is to blow a lot of money on acquisitions and then fail to integrate the acquisition in a way that increases the bottom line.)
Strong disagree. I put my money into other companies because those companies create more money with that money than I can.
I don't give money to companies for them to give it back to me. I give money to companies because their investment decisions are superior than my investment decisions.
Amazon can spend $5000 on new computers (and make more than $5000 back) in the long term. Better than anything I put $5000 in on. All shares are created from either the Initial Public Offering (which raised money for the company), or secondary offerings (an additional raising round after the IPO).
The company, however, never pays a dividend. Eventually, the world changes and the company makes a few missteps, and then one day, bang! The company is bankrupt and your share is worthless.
Now, you could argue that you made money when you sold the share, but the guy who bought it didn't. Without dividends, the stock market is a zero-sum game. In fact, it's the world's biggest Ponzi scheme, with money coming in from new investors being used only to pay out to past investors.
That's not how bankruptcy works.
Kodak, Sears, K-Mart have proven that it (typically) takes years, maybe even decades, for a dying company to go bankrupt.
> The company is bankrupt and your share is worthless.
That's also not how bankruptcy works. Your factory equipment will be sold to the highest bidder, and your shareholders will be given the money that was left-over (after bondholders and suppliers are paid).
> Without dividends, the stock market is a zero-sum game.
Also a false assertion. The stock's price is most commonly tied to the equipment, land, and other resources a company holds.
If the equipment, land, and resources "suddenly" become worthless, then yes, the company is worthless. But in practice, land, equipment, and resources have real value. And that real value, is often above-and-beyond the cash value of those resources.
Tesla paid $5 Billion for the Gigafactory 1. I think it was a bad purchase, but the shareholders own the Gigafactory. I would never buy Tesla shares, because I think Tesla overpaid for their equipment, the land, and the workers at that site.
Tesla was ONLY able to buy the Gigafactory 1 because a pool of investors brought together $2+ Billion in 2014 (a secondary offering). The bond market handled the rest of the debts needed to build the factory.
As long as the Gigafactory 1 makes more than $5 billion over time, then Tesla will be a good buy for its shareholders and its managers.
(Unfortunately, Gigafactory 1 was a bad buy for Tesla and Panasonic. But that's another topic....). Most importantly, Tesla shareholders own a stake in that factory (and every other piece of Tesla). If it weren't for Wall Street organizing things, the Gigafactory 1 would never exist.
That's the power of the market: to conjure up $5 Billion out of nothing but the hopes-and-dreams of millions of investors, to hopefully make a factory that will hopefully make enough cars to be profitable.
And guess what? If Tesla goes bankrupt, those investors are happy that Tesla tried. So the market is very far away from a "Zero Sum" game. Go and ask any Tesla investor if you don't believe me. The vast majority are bought into this "changing the world" story, and are willing to lose money over it.
plus most of tesla is owned by institutional money: pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, mutual funds. i can guarantee that money very much cares about economic outcome.
most tesla shareholders are NOT the fanboys as you claim.
Factories won't build themselves. It doesn't matter if you're Google / Facebook buying servers, Tesla building factories, O buying houses, or even Disney's entirely virtual intellectual property (Marvel / Mickey Mouse / ownership of cartoon characters + movie characters). Shares are a share of the company. Owners of those shares are literally the owners of the servers, factories, or houses (or other "assets") that these companies own.
To build new assets usually requires money, and that money was provided at some time by an IPO raising money for a company. That's what a share fundamentally is.
dragontamer
""If a shareholder sees a company they own shares in has filed Chapter 7, it is near certain they’ll receive nothing," [Lynn M. LoPucki, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and the founder of the UCLA-LoPucki Bankruptcy Database] said. "If they see a company has filed Chapter 11, it's highly probable they will receive nothing.""
https://www.finra.org/investors/what-corporate-bankruptcy-me...
"Although a company may emerge from [Chapter 11] bankruptcy as a viable entity, generally, the creditors and the bondholders become the new owners of the shares. In most instances, the company's plan of reorganization will cancel the existing equity shares. This happens in bankruptcy cases because secured and unsecured creditors are paid from the company's assets before common stockholders. And in situations where shareholders do participate in the plan, their shares are usually subject to substantial dilution."
https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/invest...
"Also a false assertion. The stock's price is most commonly tied to the equipment, land, and other resources a company holds."
dragontamer
No. No, no, no. When you buy any financial instrument, you are giving someone money now in exchange for a (hopefully larger)[1] sum of money to be returned to you later.
The majority of the millions of Tesla investors can believe anything they want, but I'll guarantee you that Baillie Gifford & Co, Capitol World Investors, the Public Investment Fund, Vanguard, Blackrock and the other 926 institutional investors that own 56.27% of TSLA shares (https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/ownership-summary) do so because they expect to get more money out of the company than they put in.
You will find some investors define the "value" of a share of stock to be the net present value of the sum of the portion of future earnings the share represents. That's wrong; it's actually the net present value of the dividend stream plus any residual paid to shareholders when the company is wound up. (And yes, I've actually owned shares in companies that paid out on being finalized; I'd recommend against it as it confuses the daylights out of your broker's account tracking stuff. It took years to get the 0-value shares off my holdings list. The one interesting thing you will notice is that when a company announces the intention to do that, their share price immediately moves to be somewhere near their distribution value divided by the number of outstanding shares.) You will find exactly no one serious who defines the value of a stock to the company's book value, for any company that is a going concern. (Special situation investor note: if you find a company whose shares are worth much less than their book value per share (minus "intangible" parts of the book value, which are worthless), you may have found a good investment. Cough, cough, GME.)
The bottom line is that if you give money to a company in, say, an IPO, and that company never pays a dividend, they will eventually go out of business and you will get approximately nothing. You will have made a bad investment. The only hope for you, personally, is to sell your shares to some greater idiot and let them ride the shares down to worthlessness. That is very much a zero-sum game: any money you gain selling your share is lost by someone else. (Wait---the initial investment. It's actually a negative sum game.)
[1] Insurance is a special case. That I'm not getting into here.
You have an opinion against data.
And when your data runs contrary to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and tons of other points of data in today's market... I think its reasonable to question the data. Is data from 1870s still relevant today? The USA was still on gold + silver (silver standard!!), and the Fed didn't even exist yet.
Case in point: maybe your data is only relevant during the times when the gold standard was still being followed (before the 70s, when Nixon finally ended the gold standard).
The economy of today's market is grossly different than 1600s era Dutch traders.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nifty_Fifty
Are those companies bad? Probably no. Will they plunge and be available at a steep discount? Quite likely.
http://bilalhafeez.com/the-oldest-book-ever-written-on-tradi...
They even had options, called "opsies".
A $1000 will not get you anywhere. You can maybe turn it into $2000 after inflation within 5-10 years, on average.
Therefore, your statement "only dividends matter" must be incorrect since Amazon stock has a non-zero value.
Whether or not the company has paid out dividends in the past is a good predictor of whether they'll do so in the future, but it's not the only such predictor. Having accumulated a mountain of cash but using it to invest in the business (buildings, equipment, and other productive assets) is another. Probably better, at least in some sense/cases.
The other way in which the stock is supported is by other people's expectations of other people's expectations of future dividends, and so on. I.e., speculation. Still tied to dividends, just in an unhealthy and volatile way.
I would make a large bet that Amazon will announce a share buyback and/or dividend in the next 5 years.
That of course means that it's not actually a law of economics, the way it's always presented. And I must confess myself reluctant to believe this is a permanent situation.
But if there is no expectation that shareholders will actually receive any of the future cash flows, then there are zero future cash flows to discount.
[0]: https://qz.com/1611997/warren-buffett-hints-on-timing-of-big...
84 companies in the S&P 500 index do not pay dividends.
https://www.dividend.com/investor-resources/sp-500-companies...
"A short quiz: If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef? Likewise, if you are going to buy a car from time to time but are not an auto manufacturer, should you prefer higher or lower car prices? These questions, of course, answer themselves. But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the "hamburgers" they will soon be buying"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-why-stocks-ham...
Market timing is dumb.
I put money in the market if it's going up, I put money in the market when it's going down. Always be saving.
I plan to just put around 10% of my income every month in it and just let it accumulate, but I have this nagging feeling crash is set for 2020. I have 2021 set as a hard cap if it doesn't fall until then, I plan on buying stocks, but until then I do plan on saving the 10% to be able to buy more when and if it falls.
So, am I dumb with this strategy? Am I better off just starting now and not keeping it in a savings account with a real low yearly yield?
Edit: don't want to pollute the comments so adding it here, thank you for your insights guys! :)
A lot of people have been waiting for a crash for years. People on 2013 were saying that the bull market couldn't last much longer, and here we are in 2019.
At the end of the day, it's a bet on the market. Personal investment is 80% regret-minimization so make your bet but hedge against it somewhat.
Or this one, based on Bridgewater's All Weather portfolio: https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/all-seasons-portfolio/
I'd try to understand them before you choose one, though - your asset allocation is one of the most impactful investing decisions you'll ever make. Gold is very divisive, for example, so if you want to go with one of these that includes it, I'd understand why. (It's unproductive, but it's generally anti-correlated with a lot of other assets, which is increasingly rare, and can be very helpful when rebalancing).
Either way, though, you should start investing that 10% of your income; the only question is what to do with what you've already saved. You could, for instance, match that 10% every month from your existing savings. That way, you're not dumping a pile of money into stocks all at once.
(Also, in case you don't already have a specific plan for investing: index funds with very low overhead, such as Vanguard's VTSAX.)
The only problem is when the market is going down, most people are losing money. Therefore, people don't have any excess funds to invest when its technically the best time to invest (when the market is going down).
Your assumption is we have infinite growth on a finite planet, which unfortunately is not the case. Eventually the party will be over, and you'll be left with the tab.
Assuming growth is linearly correlated with resources. It's not, wealth can be created though cognitive effort i.e. software engineering.
> finite planet
Assuming humans are bounded to Earth for growth.
The markets are the collective reflection of humanities productive efforts in the form of currency. Saying that growth will cease to exist in the future is the same as saying humanity will cease to be productive, a bet I am not personally willing to make.
You're arguing against an implicit faith in the civic religion of infinite growth, and the cognitive dissonance this causes.
At any given instant, you are about to start investing in something. You may have to stop investing in something else to do it. Your goal at any instant is to maximize the profit of your next few moments of investing. An effective strategy for you MAY to go long, as you describe, holding on to an investment for a long time. But that doesn't mean it's the most effective strategy for everyone.
The farmer may do better to unload his hens, live off of cattle for a few years, and then move back to hens.
I believe that's what the parent meant. At any given moment your money is somewhere: stocks, cash, bonds. You transfer from one to the other when you feel the time is right for it. In that sense every move is market timing.
That does imply that most people shouldn't move their money very often. Do some research, buy and hold, and don't worry overmuch about whether you bought near the top or the bottom. Put new money (e.g. salary) into something with low overhead, like an index fund, unless you've got good reason to think you can do better with a specific choice of stock.
If you find a bargain, buy it. But buying bargains is a matter of timing: it's only a bargain if it goes up eventually.
Most people sell labor or knowledge for 20-50 years during their lives. Pretty much continuously. So during a recession you can spend some of the money you get from your labor on stocks that are "on sale".
That's a lot of ifs, but that's precisely what we're discussing - how best to behave in different circumstances. "Always hold" isn't the best answer in all circumstances, despite what many in this thread are saying.
1) Your goal in investing
2) Heuristics to achieve that goal
The goal is to maximize your investments over a time, as I stated. Yes, you're absolutely right that holding is a phenomenal heuristic. But that doesn't mean it's always the correct thing to do.
This is only true for short traders or others who measure profits on a horizon measured in hours or less. For everyone else, the chicken example is pretty good, though the feasibility depends on the timescale over which you will be investing.
Not at all. My goal with investing is "How do I get a good return on investment in the next X amount of time?", for various values of X that tend to be as long as reasonably possible.
> The farmer may do better to unload his hens, life off of cattle for a few years, and then move back to hens.
The comment you're responding to gave an example of hens dropping in price. That's the worst time to unload them. Trying to time the market is a great way to buy high and sell low.
This would be the best time to unload them, if you don't have a long hold philosophy.
If you can predict "the price of hens is about to drop" more reliably than the market can, that would make you exceptionally rare. And if you don't already know and have evidence that you can make such predictions reliably, the safe bet is that you can't. Many people try, and fail, and end up buying high and selling low.
Similarly, if someone is planning on planting SOY, I'd try to talk them out of it.
Would you seriously not try to talk someone out of planting soy?
This is only true if the farmer can predict the future.
There's been a consistent drumbeat since the end of the great recession that "the next big drop is coming, just look at this chart!". Spoiler alert, they were all wrong.
Don't let these charlatans off the hook, they largely have no idea how the market works.
In other words, external forces are unpredictable. Although not always the most profitable, proper risk and market assessment of an industry, its trends, and possible future are important considerations when launching a new endeavor. However, if we all knew hens were about to drop to half price tomorrow nobody would be buying today decreasing demand and ballooning supply until the prophecy is self fulfilled.
tl;dr: Even the worst market timer would do well to just hold on to stock.
Moreover living off the dividends and not the principal assumes you have vastly more savings than most people manage to do. For most people, they should anticipate to run down their principal in retirement, not just interest and dividends.
You're doing yourself a financial disservice if you focus on dividends. Total returns are more important:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXI_Vd51dA
There is no financial difference between have $1000 in stock and $40 in cash dividends, and having the stock go up to $1040 and you then selling $40 dollars' worth of principal.
Treating the $1000+$40 as "better" than $1040 is a form of mental accounting:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting
Do a search for "dividend myths".
The majority of people probably are using tax-sheltered accounts and are primarily saving for retirement, or their kid's education.
If anyone can max out all of those, and pay their cost of living, they're (a) doing quite well for themselves, and (b) probably a small portion of the population.
The advice to not focus on dividends but on total returns is geared toward the general public, who probably don't want to get into the minutiae of tax laws. :)
Maxing out your annual pension allowance - as I said it depends on your personal circumstances, however I think many people on HN mid/late career will have no difficulty there
Innovation and startups are themselves evidence that over long (decades) time scales, this isn't true. When a company in the index falls on hard times and folds, where did its revenues go? Frequently, it's to some startup that was privately held until a couple years ago. By the time it IPOs and gets included in the index, much of the wealth has already been generated, and its inclusion in the index is a transfer of wealth from passive investors to the founders, angels, and VCs who funded it when it was far from a sure bet.
A similar situation would occur if a younger generation decides that stocks in general are a scam and that they're going to put all their money into cryptocurrencies. I've met 20-somethings who actually say that; if enough of them believe it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and all the old folks whose retirements are in indexed 401(k)s end up holding the bag as those investments become worthless and a younger generation ends up inventing a whole new financial system.
If the world's investments cease to be made in actual companies, in favor of a meaningless commodity, we'll have much bigger problems.
Investing in Joe's Can Factory allows Joe to make more cans.
Of course, right now, the only thing practical to fund with cryptocurrency is a cryptocurrency or internet business, none of which provide truly useful or necessary services
This is not a problem. If cryptocurrencies become widely used and the associated business accumulate significant market value, major market indices will rebalance in such a way to include cryptocurrency businesses and the passive index investor will be fine.
In fact, it doesn't matter if the future is in crypto, plastic or tulips; equity index investors will be fine.
Basically, the index fund itself becomes a bet that the future will look much like the present, at least qualitatively, and that future investors will demand the same categories of securities as present ones do. If the future looks dramatically different from the present, then people who bet correctly with their particular version of the future reap the spoils, at the expense of all index fund investors.
(I should note that this is explicitly the purpose of indexing - by giving up the possibility of above-market returns and settling for market returns, you can eliminate the need for fees. If you believe that being average is good enough, this is a good bet. If you believe that the average person is going to get screwed and bad financial things will happen to the lots of people, why would you want to be them?)
More likely they will buy new crypto focused companies (Coinbase IPO) or that existing firms will adopt crypto based business lines. The investment is firms innovating, rather than the value of the underlying instruments or technology they use.
Between weird investment strategies, the length of the current boom, and the very low interest rates at the peak of the boom, this coming bust is going to be a massacre. I'm honestly not even sure whether the system as a whole will survive it.
This works as long as there are enough non-index investors trying to outsmart the market by actively trading.
The question then remains the same while changing. Do I invest in the market, or in canned goods?
But although you might get better returns picking the next strategy, you probably would do fine with index funds.
And timing the market has always been a loser strategy (except for a few lucky or skilled outliers).
For us, if stocks get too weak, the boom might be over and our ability to retain and obtain jobs that pay as much as they do now is very much in jeopardy.
If the price of eggs drops 50% once you're retired, then you might be in a lot of trouble.
Recoveries have generally take up to 2-3 years, so if you have that much of your portfolio in cash and GICs, you can weather a downturn without having to touch your equities:
* https://www.myownadvisor.ca/cash-wedge-opening-investment-ta...
One suggestion, which is not popular, is to take a portion of your retirement savings and buy an annuity: enough to cover your day-to-day expenses. This way, regardless of what your invested portfolio is doing, food and shelter (rent/property taxes) are covered. You would consider the annuity as part of your fixed-income ("bond") portion of your portfolio.
The general advice of not worrying about market dips/corrections is good. Even if you only invest at market peaks, if you stick with it and don't sell, things will turn out pretty well:
> Meet Bob.
> Bob is the world’s worst market timer.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
The specific advice of going after dividends is not as prudent, as one should (especially with retirement savings) go after total return:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXI_Vd51dA
There are a whole bunch of myths that have sprung up over dividends:
> Dividend Myth #1: Companies that pay dividends are inherently better investments than those that don’t.
> Dividend Myth #2: Dividend investors are successful because they select excellent companies and buy them when they are attractively priced.
> [Total of six myths.]
* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/2011/01/18/debunking-dividen...
I think that thinking is at fault, at least in part, for the massive loss that's pending in terms of a deep market correction, because it's valuing based on growth and not on fundamentals.
If you can sell eggs for 10 cents each, you have a cap on the price of chickens. Now you can adjust this for future growth but you still have a limit in the fundamentals of getting a return on your money.
But when you invest ignoring that, you might do well for a very long time. As chickens go from $500 to $1,000 to $10,000, etc. more people see it and join in, pushing the price higher. In the end, it's a Ponzi scheme. You'll only do well if you get out before it comes crashing down.
On 2018-12-24 the S&P 500 tanked, and a lot of people were freaking out:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/12/buying-when-stocks-...
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/12/5-thoughts-on-the-m...
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/12/the-forgotten-bear-...
And then they went up, and then hit an all-time high a little while ago, and there seems to be a bit of a swoon now (2019-08).
For most people, the best thing to do is ignore the news, and put away a little each month automatically ("pay yourself first"). Dollar cost averaging is a thing that works well in most situations.
The average investor shouldn't try to outsmart the market. But, if there are indications the price of hens is going to dip dramatically, it may be worth delaying that big purchase.
Do I buy as many hens as I can right now?
I heard of studies that lump sum investing is better than dollar cost averaging two thirds of the time, but I’m quitting my biggest income source soon. What is one to do in this case?
Look at that. US Stocks with dividends reinvested: 6 million dollars. US Stocks without dividends reinvested: 200 thousand dollars.
Where do other international investors like ones from Singapore, Hong Kong invest? And what vehicles they use for minimizing taxes as an international investors.
I've USD cash in bank, so if USD falls in value my wealth is erroded overnight. Can someone suggest what I should be doing?
This is completely unlike stocks, which you can hold forever at no cost, and whose output, on average, goes up over time.
If we need to make an analogy to something non-investors can relate to... well, it’s pretty tough. Which is probably why there are so many different opinions out there about how you should feel in response to various events.
"Suppose you’re just starting out as an egg farmer, and your goal is to build up a nice, profitable business. You want to build up a flock of hens so big that they are eventually producing thousands of eggs per month. Enough to live off for life and retire.
You buy your first 100 hens, and they get right to work. You allow those eggs to hatch so more hens can be born, and you also continue to buy hens from the farm supply store. Suddenly your phone rings and it’s Farmer Joe down the road. “The price of hens has just dropped by 50%! You’ve just lost five grand on those hundred hens you bought last summer!”
Is this a sensible way to think about it?
No, of course not. You’re happy that hens are cheaper, because now you can build your egg business even faster.
Stocks are just like hens. They lay eggs called “dividends”, which are real money that can either flow automatically into your checking account, or automatically reinvest itself to buy still more stocks...There’s only one time you care if one of your shares is down: on the day you sell it."
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2016/02/29/what-to-do-about-...