This is terrible advice, major bank stocks have been stagnant for a decade

Two things: dividends, and significantly less covid-drop than all my other stocks.

I don't consider myself a brilliant trader (that would be Warren Buffet) but I do like a bit of the balance he preaches. Banks are indeed slow moving, but they are less likely to die away in today's rough and tumble.

Since everything is universally down right now since Covid became more of a reality than distant news, I'll happily leave a chunk of my money on shares that I know will still be worth something when I'm ready to exercise them. I have "play money" which I would refer to a pool of shares that wobble around insanely and generally make good for me, and a bunch on banks as a safe buffer. The dividends are automatically put back into shares on the bank, so I have now some fractional shares, too.

I bought the majority of my bank shares at the point I figured the banks "bottomed out" from the initial shock of Covid lockdown. I certainly wouldn't buy them when everyone is up since, as you have alluded to, it would take forever to profit on it then. Slow and steady wins that particular race. Volatile over a longer period of time is too risky if you want to "set it and forget it" and it'll make more money for you than simply leaving it in the bank.

Do you expect a once in a decade (and by some measurements, once in a lifetime) crash to happen twice in the same year, or several years from now? I don't doubt there will be a second wave - the US is by most accounts still mired in the first wave, but I suspect most people probably missed the boat on the "bottoming out" event. Stranger stuff has happened though. Interesting take.

It depends on if it can be considered one drop or two, and who decides. If you look at many of the stock crashes. There is an initial drop, followed by a recovery, and then a further drop.

This recovery seems strangely stable (to me) but from what I understand there has never been a government who has pumped this much money into the market in order to maintain the highs.

One thing to consider which I heard the other day. [paraphrasing] "Invest in the market in front of you, not the one you think should be." There are so many people saying "well the market would be lower if the fed hadn't printed so much money, etc etc" but you can't invest in the market where they didn't, so you have to look at where you are, what you think will happen and go from there.

Exactly this. And people doubting there could be a second wave are completely ignoring what happened with the Spanish Flu. Given how people are treating the current pandemic, I fully expect a repeat show of that historical period. So I'm preparing for that. And if it doesn't happen, ah well, at least the money I didn't sink into the market yet isn't lost - it's just stagnant for a few months.

I've been thinking about this "not lost - just stagnant" thing the last week, unfortunately, I don't think it's actually true. You are always losing or gaining depending on what you are comparing to. If the economy is measured by the market, then it costs you more to get in later, it's effectively the same as losing.

Sure, you may not be losing on purchasing power of staple goods, but on almost any scale where an investment is valuable, you are losing, unless you can get in at the net crash. Just a different perspective.

You might have noticed a whole lot of stocks dropped today. If I had my float money on some other stocks instead, they would have lost along with the rest. Instead, because it was liquid, I was able to buy at today's lows. Mainly today I bought more of some shares I already own because they were down a fair amount (bought pre-covid), and today's purchase made the loss a much smaller percent. Eventually the markets will rebound and I'll have a lot of money there and a much shorter route to green territory.

To avoid fees, I have to make 2 trades a quarter minimum. I consider those fees to be losses, even though they aren't terribly substantial. So there is also that incentive to keep a float and wait for good moments like today for buys. There's no reason to buy immediately just because I got paid today.

I'm not done for the day yet. But that's why I say stagnant and not lost. It's more than just the one-phrase simplification I originally posted, as I was just focusing on that one aspect of it.