New York Times Your Money columnist Ron Lieber wrote an interesting article Picking Stocks After Facebook. He had someone look up the best performing stocks since 1982 in the Wilshire 5000 Index, which is basically everything except very tiny ones. It turns out that most of the best performing stocks are largely unknown (to me […]
Experiment: Buying On A Dip
I said in a previous post in December that I would do a small experiment on my IRA contribution for 2012. See Lump Sum, Dollar Cost Average, Or Wait for Dip? Instead of contributing $5,000 at the first opportunity (January 3 this year because January 2 was a holiday), I would wait for a small […]
Market Timing: Transaction Costs and Taxes
I continue to look for criticisms of market timing and see how the market timing proponents would answer them. Last time I looked at some criticisms from Vanguard founder John Bogle. I think those criticisms were answered reasonably well. Another major area of criticisms centers around frequent trading, transaction costs and taxes. Critics say market […]
Market Timing: Criticisms From John Bogle
In the previous post Market Timing vs Conservative Portfolio I explored a possible valid reason for market timing. Proponents say that market timing isn’t so much for enhancing returns but for reducing risks. Although market timing underperforms the market, an investor with low risk tolerance would invest in a conservative portfolio anyway, which also underperforms […]
Market Timing vs Conservative Portfolio
After listening to Paul Merriman’s Sound Investing podcast, I found out that Paul Merriman does both indexing and market timing. He said of the $1.5 billion his company manages for clients, about 15% are invested in market timing strategies. That’s quite peculiar. Usually people who follow indexing believe in market efficiency, which says it’s unlikely […]