I tend to agree with this and I'm also long several gold miners, and I've swing traded some of them (one was a value buy with a long-standing issue with the Greek government that I was watching the news on for years).
It baffles me how this Bogleheads philosophy has taken tech people. People can't wrap their heads around the idea that gold goes up in times of trouble, or that work from home tech is likely to go up, or that oil is likely to go down, or whatever other myriad bets one can make.
My approach is to maintain almost all cash and to trade a small percentage of the cash on extremely volatile stocks, preparing to hold long-term if necessary. I rarely invest in fully scammy pump and dumps (but lately pharma has paid off, for obvious reasons).
I use the news cycle and try to anticipate what others are doing. You don't need to sell at the top and buy at the bottom to make money.
In contrast, I'm looking at my work 401K which is managed with those mathemetically unstoppable index funds. It's down 2 percent while I'm up 30.
Now what am I to do with the cash portion of my investment. I'm leaning in bond funds (because bond picking is something I have no idea about).
How long do you think you can keep up the 30% returns? How many active investors/traders do you know have had 30% returns year after year? I think it is easy to lose sight of the long term possibilities when you are thinking about the short term.
I'm up 75% this year [0] by buying companies I like and holding them 'forever'. But if someone asks me for investing advice I'll still tell them to go for index funds.
Because while I might be lucky enough to trounce the market right now, that doesn't mean I'll trust anyone to pick the right companies. It's safer to go for average returns than to risk the market trouncing you, especially with the vast majority of your wealth. And no, this etoro account is not my main investment account.
I'm happy you've been beating index funds and hope you can keep that streak going. Have you considered the opportunity cost of spending time researching and picking stocks though? You don't just need to beat index funds, you need to beat index funds plus whatever you could earn by spending that time on something else.
It baffles me how this Bogleheads philosophy has taken tech people. People can't wrap their heads around the idea that gold goes up in times of trouble, or that work from home tech is likely to go up, or that oil is likely to go down, or whatever other myriad bets one can make.
My approach is to maintain almost all cash and to trade a small percentage of the cash on extremely volatile stocks, preparing to hold long-term if necessary. I rarely invest in fully scammy pump and dumps (but lately pharma has paid off, for obvious reasons).
I use the news cycle and try to anticipate what others are doing. You don't need to sell at the top and buy at the bottom to make money.
In contrast, I'm looking at my work 401K which is managed with those mathemetically unstoppable index funds. It's down 2 percent while I'm up 30.
Now what am I to do with the cash portion of my investment. I'm leaning in bond funds (because bond picking is something I have no idea about).