It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
I’ll do what I can to break out the defibrillators and bring this site back to life, starting with this statistic that caught me by surprise:
“According to analyst Eddy Elfenbein, over the last twenty years, the 24 best days in the stock market accounted for the entire gain in the S&P 500. The other 99.5% of the time has been a net loss.”
Mentally, we are all programmed to think linearly: if you know that healthy American enterprises tend to produce 10% annual returns over the long haul (6.5-7% is in real returns, the other 3.0-3.5% is matching inflation), it can be tempting to imagine the wealth-building process as something that hums along nicely to the tune of 0.8% gains each month. But yet, the reality is that the rapid increases in wealth come in fits and spurts. The investing game may … Read the rest of this article!