The empirical evidence is clear - for most people, day trading of any kind is a reliable way to lose money, and even buy-and-hold can kill you if pick the wrong asset class. (Ask Warren Buffet.)
You may be lucky, you may have an unusually effective model - but the odds are you're the noob at the poker table and the pros are laughing at you as they clean you out.
The S&P tripled in value since 2010, so you would've had to invest $333.000 at that time and cash out now to become a millionaire. But few people have that. That's a 1%, I already made my fortune / I have rich parents privilege.
Sure, ANY amount you put in there would've gotten tripled, but turning $1000 into $3000 isn't going to make that big a difference.
And if you have hundreds of thousands lying around, I'd argue that buying a house would be more beneficial for your well-being in the short term.
Disclaimer: I've invested some money in the past, both low-risk long-term stuff, index funds, and 'play money' into meme funds like Apple and Tesla. I think at most I've doubled what I put in? Didn't lose money (even with the rona), that's for sure.
I try to not go "I should've done x" too much though, like "I shouldn't have sold my handful of $250 Tesla stocks when I did".
If you'd done this 40 years ago, the million dollars you'd have today would have the equivalent purchasing power of $300,000 in 1980. Inflation is a cruel master.
Some common answers might be:
* healthcare, always expensive
* things for your kids, including education, housing, access to jobs
* random consumer spending including holidays or travel
* charity
Presuming you were able to actually afford saving $400/mo while living reasonably comfortably which is definitely not a given and not quite as common as expected by some.
And presuming you're not altogether unlucky in your strategy, which can happen.
You will have probably also accrued still useful assets to pass on or use. Or lost them.
$400/mo saved in a 0% interest bank account for 40 years = $192,000
$400 * 12/year invested at 10% (incl. inflation) for 40 years = $2.12 million
While $2.12mm in 2020 money is $440,000 in 1980 money (assuming 4% inflation), it's still much better than the alternative.
A couple of other points:
* Investing $400/mo earlier is relatively harder than $400/mo later in the 40-year timeline assuming compensation increased by the inflation rate but one keeps the invested amount ($400 here) constant. This is ignoring factors like salary increases later in one's career (not sure if that even generalizes for lower-income professions).
* I wonder if there's any study done tracking if there's actually a steady increase in spending consistent with the inflation rate for all individuals (with some stochasticity). Or, do people adjust the goods they buy and "outwit" inflation? For e.g., the biggest purchase one makes usually, a house/apartment, doesn't scale with inflation. Similarly, electronics actually get cheaper. So, apart from food, does spending actually track inflation?
VT is another good choice if you're lazy and just want to own a slice of the global stock market.
2. SP500 companies earn ~40% of revenue from outside the United States
To put it another way - it rolls off the tongue better than "buy a weighted amount of a CSRP (or comparable) US Total Market Index and FTSE (or comparable) Global All Cap ex US Index, where your weighting is probably slightly overweighted to domestic".
Often (usually?) when people say it, they aren't literally advocating to only buy S&P 500. Some people still do recommend this, but I'd wager they're closer to a minority now. Famously I'm pretty sure Warren Buffett is still advocating S&P 500 only, and it takes a long time for voices like Michael Burry to outweigh. Vanguard pushed out a whitepaper years back, and made a very public change in their own corporate 401k to get rid of the s&p500 fund choice.
Apart from the 2008 boom/crash, owning a house has been a great way for the middle class to become asset millionaires. I knew someone in London who was routinely out-earned by the asset appreciation on their own house.
Besides, inflation has rather moved the bar for "millionaire" to every middle class couple with a house and two retirement funds..
there are certainly some hot real estate markets where houses appreciate a huge amount over a short period of time. in hindsight, it looks like a no-brainer to purchase a house in these areas. on the flip side, maybe someone builds a huge apartment complex on your street right before you wanted to sell and the value plummets. if you look at the whole american housing market though, there is a ton of variance but in the long term it seems to barely outpace inflation. [0] once you factor in maintenance and property tax, it doesn't really look like a good investment vehicle. imo, buying a house is best looked at as an alternative way to pay for housing which may or may not be superior to renting.
> Besides, inflation has rather moved the bar for "millionaire" to every middle class couple with a house and two retirement funds..
for sure, a million dollars just isn't that much anymore. if you follow the 4% rule, it gives you about $40k to spend every year. which is basically what it costs me to live in a studio in a relatively nice part of town as a single twenty-something.
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2006/08/26/weekinreview/27le...
It was abundantly clear when we bought that our location would not have a large apartment building built next to it - you can at least to some degree select for factors like that.
With all costs considered, we lived in a 2000 sq ft home with attached 2+ car, large shed, biggest yard on the block, etc. for a little bit less than it would've cost us to stay in our previous small 2 bedroom apartment in a equivalent enough location, assuming even that the rent remained the same for the past 10 years.
And on top of it we're walking away with $100,000 in equity. That is accounted for in the costs - but I'm not so sure that I would've actually saved that $100k if it hadn't been getting stuck away in the property value all along.
Anecdotal, of course, but it seemed like a no brainer at the time and in fact turned out to be such. It's not for no reason that home ownership is widely recommended as a good financial move.
Indeed. Hoarding cash is for fools. I'm always bemused by the claims that wealthy people hoard cash.
And some will set up a charity, but people like Bill Gates have never spent a significant portion of their wealth on that. Again though, that may be a logistical problem - they can't spend money fast enough whilst not splurging it.
Of course, the solution is simple; have the companies pay their staff better. Or give the staff stocks themselves, to be force-bought by the employer when they leave / get fired, and have it pay out dividends monthly to stipend their base income. This gives the employees representation in the board of directors as well, which is much needed in the modern capitalist system.
That is not "hoarding cash" - keeping your net worth under the mattress or in a savings account is hoarding cash. Perhaps, at the margin, a money market account.
This has been its use for a long time in any publication talking about money.
I know when you say "hoard wealth" you really mean not spend their wealth, because I'm not really sure how you "hoard wealth", as being wealthy basically means you've got stores of valuable assets... or a hoard if you will.
The two phrases are definitely not used interchangeably.
Only if you decided to sell then. If you did nothing, you'd have been fine.
I think he was referring to the adrenaline rush, not the potential to make life changing amounts of money playing the long game, which clearly doesn't yield the same 'rush' he was referring to but is none-the-less an effective strategy.
I'm an unabashed adrenaline junkie: I've been in martial arts, school sports, motorsports, I did regular public speaking engagements for my startup and in academic-based oratory before that, and spent time in high end Kitchens... but with that said, to this day I will never understand the mediocre adrenaline 'hit' you get from gambling. It's really low level stuff to me, like lower than lifting weights or running a mile, something I did regularly at the gym after getting beat up working an 11 hour shift of a busy Dinner service.
I used to play $10 buy-in tourneys of Texas-Hold'em (forced into is more like it) hosted in the living room next to my bedroom when I was in my late teens/early 20s in Motorsports and I often got so bored, even when I won, that I failed to stay in if it went longer than an hour and often asked to take a cut on my pot/payout and forfeit to just get some sleep as I had school and work in the morning.
By contrast my professional driver friends/roommates were up until 5am and one of them played online for high stakes, the other played the stock market on the side and said it felt like the same 'rush,' as a day at the track but I could never relate to either of them as a track day was way more intense for me.
Flash forward to my Bitcoin days and after the initiation you get from from a couple of years in that space with such absurd volatility and all that the drama that follows it is such that nothing really even compares to it anymore, and I wasn't even a day trader, I'm merely an early(ish) adopter so none of this makes any sense to me at all.
What I do know is that this was done for gamblers [1] after COVID and is slowly becoming the norm in legal states that have re-opened due to the demand these, quite frankly addicts, create for the Casino Industry.
I wonder if something like Neuralink could help mitigate these diseases, as it all seems to stem from a neurological/neurotransmitter stimulation/feedback loop. I'm less concerned with the Matrix-style downloading/AI integration and more focused on what it could do for people with severe Depression, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS.
1: https://www.highstakesdb.com/10328-covid-19-friendly-blackja...
Stocks, on the other hand, have an upward bias. Of course, there could be events like losing a war where your portfolio will be vaporized, but in such cases you're going to lose anyway, so there's no point in worrying about such catastrophes.
I.e. I don't invest in ignorant fantasies.
I recall going to Lake Tahoe once. Buses would pull up to the casinos, disgorging mobs of silver-haired people rushing into the casinos to spend the day losing money.
It's sad.
Granted, I do complicate things a little by insisting that I never sell anything I buy, not even for rebalancing, until retirement (otherwise I wouldn't be buying and holding in my eyes). However, I get around that by constantly rebalancing with new money [1].
Honestly, I find it rather jarring that as someone who usually frequents /r/personalfinance and Bogleheads, I see lots of investing suggestions on HN that do not involve indexing.
Some people call it "locking in your gains". I call it "minimizing your returns".
Gambling is a word used to describe anything beyond your own acceptable risk tolerance.
gambling - where the odds are against you
investing - where the odds are in your favor
Sure it does. I've seen lower middle class people become millionaires that way. Of course, one needs the discipline to not succumb to spending it on a car/house/divorce, and the intestinal fortitude to not panic sell when the market tanks.