If thats the way you feel you should just put all of your money into the SPY's and forget about it, but if you want to be a trader you need to be able to trade both sides of the market, if you only play the buy side, then you are eliminating 50% of the opportunity, especially when the market is just chop.
Flowbee5, so uh how about that bull market in 2002 and the other one in 2008? Yea we get it - in the long term the market drifts up. But I think at the point peaks are happening 7-8 years apart from each other it's completely reasonable to focus closer than say a 50y chart.
Exactly, if you just started investing in 1999 your return doesnt even beat the amount you would make in bonds. If you bought in 2009 your up 300%, So yeah the market obviously has an upside bias that everyone should be cognizant of, but timing is crucial if you want to make big returns.
But clearly you and S2007S don't get it. You both dismiss many years as some form of magic because it doesn't agree with you. The reality is NA markets appreciate long term and have done so since 1929. Yes S2007S claims this time is different and some mysterious crash is coming that will end that long trend forever. Utter nonsense. But what are we to expect from posters who don't understand economics and like to declare everything fake, and constantly attribute large market moves to one or two aspects like interest rates or government debt policy. I could go back to the situation in the 1980s that preceded a huge bull market move but that would only confuse the two of you immensely. S2007S thinks a 0.5% interest rate hike would create a deep recession in the US. Somehow Canada made that exact move in fall 2010 and there was no recession. But reality always confuses those living in a fantasy world. You'd rather declare fakery and magic then do proper research, get educated, and think clearly.
2009 was an obvious buying point, I posted at the time that most bull markets are at least 4-5 years long in the face of numerous posters on here saying this time is different, it's not a bull market, US markets will stay down for many years, and all sorts of other fanciful bs. S2007S was one of those posters. Extremely bearish in 2009. That would make him one of those "FOOLS" he keeps posting about, those who can't see longer term moves coming at all. Perhaps it is that reality that dogs him to this day, that his emotions prevented him from taking one of the easiest trades of our lifetime, long indexes in 2009 for anywhere from 4-6 years.
LOL, Canada is currently falling apart, the loonie has taken one of the worst nose dives in 20 years as the central banks desperately try to cut interest rates to stimulate demand. Nice example.
Nice assumption there chief, as I was definitely net long from 2009-2015. Stop being a perma-bull clown and pretending that markets don't correct or that those who do call out the nonsense behind the curtain haven't made money from it. What if I told you it's possible to control two different modes of thought at the same time? That one can have an intellectual idea about something and a method of acting on it that are not immediately obvious to each other?
Thats whats so annoying about these permabulls, they take any suggestion that the market could pull back as an insult. Probably the reason why they are more ornary than usual is because they have made precisely nothing with buy and hold this year, while real traders are killing it playing the 100 point range the sandp has been in for the last 4 months.