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Strategies & Market Trends : The Art of Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: benwood who wrote (1630)	3/27/2021 6:26:34 PM
From: Lou Weed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10601

Hindsight is 20/20. For the average investor (I'm talking the 401k everyday Joe & Jane) buying an S&P500 index fund and holding it for 35 - 40 years until retirement will perform better than most fund managers. Why pay a fund a mgmt fee when the odds are stacked against it to outperform the general market?!? It would be disastrous for every 401k owner to try to time the market, ergo "buy-and-hold" for most folks is the better course in the long run. Plus most 401ks have a restriction on number of moves per year to cut down on that possibility.....save you from yourself, as it were. Obviously for the more active and savvy Joe/Jane you can increase your odds with a good strategy but folks like this are definitely the minority. I've often wondered just what percentage of this "savvy" minority do actually beat the market in the long run. Things that make you go hmmmm......

To: benwood who wrote (1630)	3/27/2021 7:47:20 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10601

Re: You would have to be an incredibly bad market timer -- professional market mistimer? -- to miss 100% of the ten best days. It is more likely than simple statistics suggest. Take a look at the best 10 days since the the start of last March. They mostly happened very close to market bottoms and local bottoms. If you are a short term timer, then how would you have known to sell on August 31 but buy on September 24 and then sell again on Oct 12 but buy on Oct 30? [Side Note: I called out the August 31st well in advance, and knew of Oct 12 a day or so later, but calling the bottom was trickier]. It takes time for trends to establish. So following short term trends is a guaranteed way to miss the best days. As I said in my previous post, for most people (and that includes the professionals), you have to decide on your risk adjusted return and on your risk tolerance. Then you can make some intelligent decisions about the investment strategy over a specific time horizon that addresses your plan. But without that, just choosing to do blind trend following, you will lose. It will be like trying to win a F1 race by driving through rear view mirror. . Now there are things that you can do to tip the odds in your favor. For example you can take a contrary position whenever something deviates 3+ standard deviations from its trendline over a very short period of time. Then reverse as soon as it falls back within the channel. This usually requires algorithmic trading, unless you have been doing it a long time and are intimately familiar with underlying. Regardless, such methods are trading methods and not investments. It is what some hedge funds do day in and day out and most of them have been losing this year. As an investment, you can look at very long term and very extreme valuations - such as we had with oil last year - and take a contrary position and average down. However, overall, these are beyond what the average retail investor can do. For most people a disciplined averaging down strategy is the best route. If one is willing to do (a good chunk of) homework, then this can be improved by allocating some of the averaging down to undervalued stocks/segments. BUT, you'd better know what value investing means. Just because something or even some segment has dropped a lot it doesn't mean it represents value. The dot-com bubble makes a good case study.

To: benwood who wrote (1630)	3/27/2021 11:47:43 PM
From: bull_dozer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10601

>> Yeah, they want to sell TO YOU at the distribution top, sucker. ‘Unprecedented’: Wall Street Ponders Goldman’s Block-Trade Spree As Wall Street speculated on the identity of the mysterious seller behind the massive $10.5 billion in block trades executed on Friday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., investors also pondered just how unprecedented the selloff was -- and whether there’s more to come. The sales lit up trader chat rooms from New York to Hong Kong and were part of an extraordinary spree that erased $35 billion from the values of bellwether stocks ranging from Chinese technology giants to U.S. media conglomerates. “I’ve never seen something of this magnitude in my 25-year career,” said Michel Keusch, portfolio manager at Bellevue Asset Management AG in Switzerland. Goldman sold $6.6 billion worth of shares of Baidu Inc., Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Vipshop Holdings Ltd. before the market opened in the U.S., according to an email to clients seen by Bloomberg News. That move was followed by the sale of $3.9 billion of shares in ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc., Farfetch Ltd., iQiyi Inc. and GSX Techedu Inc., the email said. Block trades -- the sale of a large chunk of stock at a price sometimes negotiated outside of the market -- are common, but the size of these trades and the multiple blocks hitting the market during the normal trading hours aren’t. “This was highly unusual,” said Oliver Pursche, a senior vice president at Wealthspire Advisors, which manages $12 billion in assets. “The question now is: Are they done? Is this over? Or come Monday and Tuesday, are markets are going to be hit by another wave of block trades?” bloomberg.com