"If you missed the 8 best days in the market...."

Bear Market Things and should you be 100% invested always

We decide to put money on a race between us.

You say it is whoever has the fastest 3k because your trendy. We say sure…because we don’t know wtf a ‘k’ is because we have never felt the need to virtue signal in a charity run, but 3 seems like a small number.

Race day comes, we line up at the starting line, and the gun goes off.

F’er takes off in a full sprint. Woo-eee look at us go… may have lost a step but our top speed is still impressive. 100 yards in & our lungs are on fire so we stop, look around and ask where the finish line is. Still 2.9K left to go eh? We start walking to catch out breathe.

While we are walking you leisure jog by.

Jogging is catabolic right? Yea, we aren’t jogging or yogging…As soon as F’er catches his breathe its off in a sprint again. Gassed, walk, repeat.

You finish your 3k in 15 mins. Nice, well done.

We come sprinting over the finish line at the 45 min mark. You come over, but before you can even say a word F’er yells “WINNER, you owe money”.

In your confusion, you manage a ‘wait, what?’.

“If you ignore our 10 slowest periods of walking our performance over the race absolutely wrecked you, therefore pay up” we say….

"If you missed the XX best days in the market..."

Clearly, that isn’t how races work. You can’t just arbitrarily throw out stretches of the race. In this case, each 100 yard sprit we made was only possible because of the walking between. You can’t ignore the walking periods. In stat language, these periods of sprint and walk are dependent. The more you recover, the better you can sprint and the longer you sprint, the more you need to recover.

When you put it into the concept of a race, it is abundantly clear how [redacted] the logic of arbitrarily ignoring the relationship of each period is. Races are tangible and people understand them.

Less people understand stock markets and investing. That is why you will see things like:

“If you missed the best XX days in the market, your total return would have been just 1/2 as if you were invested.”

If it isn’t abundantly clear how this statement is nearly the same as our race example, read on because we are going to explain it…

But first, some good old fashion investing fear porn examples:

“How a few poorly-timed trades can torpedo two decades of healthy returns” - torpedo 20 years of work…scary headline…and there are dozens of these…

CNBC & BOA…CNBC & BOA takes the cake….they know their low IQ audience wants the fear porn…. And BOA, when they aren’t chasing WF as the biggest POS retail bank, teams up with CNBC for a money quote, you better be sitting down :