If conventional wisdom is true, wouldn’t that be easy to rely/dictate your trading strategy based on this? Eg - options strategies, leverage, etc… just doing some simplified thinking here, curious to the rebuttals.
S&P is a momentum strategy. 500 biggest companies by market cap. The index always holds only the highest market cap companies so over time it should go up.
IT is time for you to be a trader. Then you don't bother about this Q. also as a trader, you can long it during the uptrend, and short it during the downtrend. there are also stories about investors who bought the shares. and they forgot about their share certificates until decades later. And then they became very rich. but many became very poor. anyway, whether you are an investor or trader, you have to work very very very very hard in order to be successful. getting a crystal ball wouldn't help at all.
False-flag operation. The SP goes only down over time. Look at any chart of the SP over the last 60 years, and you can clearly see the pattern of it going down over the long-term. In other words, it's pretty much the stupidest thread title question ever posted on this forum. This means you, as a member of this forum, are a false flag.
If you look at 100-year chart it surely looks like it goes up only. The problem is you live daily, and the second problem - time period bias.
Go take a look and state your hold time, champ. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/charts-for-no-reason.344272/page-23#post-5592367
Yes that's why there is index mutual fund designed to mimic the S&P with no active management from the fund manager and index ETF where you just buy and forget it. Over time apparently these funds do perform well and lots of people invest in them.
It is a momentum etf, means if the biggest names (AAPL & co.) face a problem like serious foreign competition the index will plunge. Many of the leaders have a form of monopoly. If there were alternatives to MAC OS, Google/Youtube, Windows etc with high adoption rates the ETF would plunge.
OP: In the simplified sense, sure. However, it's equally sure the end of human civilization will come at some point. However, that is a very rare event (frequency = 1 by definition) so it makes little sense to bet on it. A more actual risk besides nuclear war is the US turning into a fascist dictatorship lika Russia or having a civil war which would be bad for US stocks by risking to alter what made the US a great country [for stocks]. As for what you're essentially proposing is to lever up on the belief that eventually you will be in the green. For long term buy & hold index investment, you're really can't sit on your ass levered up via financial instruments or on margin - the drawdowns are too big for that and will break you eventually.