If you made money in 2015, no matter how little it is you have a good reason to be happy because you are better off than 70% of all investors who according to openfolio [an people use to track their investment performance] lost money. http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/31/investing/stocks-market-2015/index.html Hmmm. Maybe this year will be better.
This is hardly surprising. People lose money on investments all the time. One thing to take into consideration is that a year may not be an appropriate length of time to view the success or failure of longer term investments.
So you mean that 70% of the investors using THEIR service lost money? Guess I should be happy that I don't use this openfolio thing. Btw the S&P500 index went up during 2015, though only about 1%, so once again a low cost index fund would have apparently worked well for most of these people.
Meh, who cares what the average investor did. If I thought I was an average investor, I would just put my money in an index fund. I am a brutally un-emotional investor, which I think puts me well above average considering most people let their emotions rule them. I also have above average math skills, especially when it comes to statistics and probability I also think, because of the cost of trading, the average investor will under perform the market overall by a small amount.
The best thing to do is think longterm. There are going to be very good, fair, ok, flat, slightly bad, and and occasional bad years over time. Some of the biggest and best investors in the world were down double digits this year. You're going to have a few years when you lose money, and some years when you under-perform the markets (whether the market is up or down). The power of compounding and dollar cost averaging work very well over time.
Can anyone explain what that 70% loss means? If there was 70% of investors who lost money in the stock market, isn't that a sign that the market is not profitable anymore? As they say in gambling, you can never win over the house because only the house wins in the end. Since the stock market is similar to gambling, can that dictum apply? That 70% who lost money is a sure turn off to new investors because the statistics are very discouraging. And what happens when there are no new investors?
The bottom line is that %70 stat doesn't mean anything regardless of how you spin it unless you are talking about short term deals. A year isn't a large enough snap shot to gauge longer term investments which is where your focus needs to be if you want to build any reasonable amount of wealth.
Good point nytegeek. I think investors are much better off looking at the long term performance of their particular investment instead of the short term. This is something they need to accurately weigh when deciding what to invest in or how long to invest their money.
I don't really think it's really surprising. If you invested in energy or commodities (which most people will do in a diverse portfolio), you lost money for the year...
It doesn't mean anything as this is data compiled by Openfolio about their users. So when they say 70%, they mean 70% of the fraction of a fraction of a percentage of investors who use this particular service. And the stock market has very little in common with gambling. For one, the stock market has a positive expectancy whereas, as you stated, in gambling it's negative.
