You're conflating index funds with S&P 500 Index funds, though. You can buy an index fund with _zero_ tech stocks. You can buy something like VINIX which has considerably less weight on the BigN tech firms.
The VINIX is down 3% YTD while the rest of the market ballooned.
Looks like we "picked stocks" by picking the indexes here, too?
I just don't understand the insistence on indexes. We're afraid of picking stocks that go bankrupt?
We work in tech, and a lot of us are science nerds. Surely we can pick names based on how we think those technologies are likely to be successful. We have access to a lot more information than people did in the 1990's with this Boglehead stuff.
Well, yeah, that's absolutely expected. The promise of index funds isn't "you'll always make money!!" over any short-term period, the promise is that if the stock market as a whole increase, which it tends to do, you'll also benefit from that.
>Surely we can pick names based on how we think those technologies are likely to be successful.
Time and time again, especially now, "fundamentals" has proven to be a poor predictor, at least in the short term. You have companies with P/E ratios of 20-30 right now.
It's not just about the underlying product, perception and all kinds of human effects also matter, which makes it a perilous place to be.
Throw your money in a big bucket and over 20-30 years, you'll be up. That's the point.
That's a matter of opinion, wrong mindset. I bought gold miners that ballooned, and swing traded pharma. This turned into money that I can use to buy things like computers and furniture. Or buy even more of the fabled broad index funds.
Vanguard and Schwab, with an increase move of capital to Schwab. They allow more advanced trading like options (no, I'm not that crazy - yet), shorting, buying and selling in the same day, etc, that Vanguard doesn't even support. Also, there's a downloadable web client that lets you create complex If Then type conditions, as well as aggregate news and customize dashboards and a bunch of other stuff.
I'm not that active trading, maybe I perform an action once every one to two weeks. I spend almost all my time just trying to absorb information.
Honestly, with all my questioning of index funds and contrarianism in comments above, I am slightly skeptical that the average person should have this much access to these types of tools. I could instantly blow away all my money and be left in debt (given they allow margin).
It's not about the amount of information you have, it's about the amount you have _relative to other investors_. In the era of algorithmic trading where companies are spending millions to get information milliseconds faster, the extra information you have by working in tech and being a science nerd is meaningless.
I highly suggest following /r/wallstreetbets for any length of time. If you see a "great deal" put in a reddit remindme and go back and figure out your "gains". You'll quickly realize stock picking with all the "better information" we have today means every other single investor has the same info. It's a madhouse of everyone seeing the same things and rushing for it, but you're doing it with Robinhood with delays and the big players have hardline terminals a dozen feet from the stock exchange.
MSCI World is also basically the top stocks from the top economies. If you want exposure to, for example, developing markets, you have to explicitly put your money into a developing market ETF. And even then, many of them have outsized holdings in a few big Chinese companies.
Psychological reasons. Retail traders performance chase, selling things when they have temporary (multi-year) losses and buy when they have temporary high gains. It's incredible how strong it is even for people who are somewhat knowledgeable about finance like Bogleheads. It's also been studied by Jack Bogle himself. There was a famous study comparing Value vs. Growth stocks he noted where retail traders who invested based off either ended up doing worse than just holding both because in aggregate they kept buying the one that recently did well and then selling it when it had done poor. Buy high, sell low.
The highest gains are also only available for a few days in the year. If there are three really good days for a stock then you're going to hit all of them if you hold it for the entire year. If you buy and sell shortly after you might miss all of them.
