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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (10737)	11/20/1999 9:06:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

I'm doing some catch-up reading and came across a favorite topic of mine -- market timing otherwise known as market ill timing. Bill Mann of the Motley Fool penned a piece on October 15 that includes some pretty hefty research about the S&P 500's most profitable days of the decade. At that point in time there had been more than 2200 days the market was open. 55% of the profits for the decade were had on only TEN days. The corollary is that had an investor in an S&P 500 index fund tried to time the market and had s/he not been in it on those ten days, 55% of the S&P's profits for the decade would have been a lost opportunity. To take that one step further, had that investor been out of the market on the 50 most profitable days out of the more than 2200 that the market was open, the S&P 500 would have rewarded that investor with exactly NO profit. Are you a good enough market timer to know which 50 of the more than 2200 days would have yielded 100% of the index's profits? And if you come to the conclusion that you aren't, as I suspect is the case, do you think you would be any better at timing a gorilla than the market? No wonder Bruce and so many of us are staunch long-term investors. It's not because we're good at what we do. It's because we'd be so BAD at trying to time the market that we don't have a reasonable alternative. --Mike Buckley