Tuesday, September 26, 2017

buying at the peak

If you bought the S&P 500 at this time 10 years ago, you watched more than half your investment erased. You heard buy-and-hold pronounced dead and watched fellow investors pull $200 billion from equities.

You also doubled your money.

Or just about, anyway. Using a version of the S&P 500 that reinvests dividends, the index has now pushed its gain since its Oct. 9, 2007 top to 98 percent. Down 55 percent at the market low in March 2009, the benchmark gauge has made all that back plus a lot more, posting annualized gains of more than 7 percent for a decade.

“It was in the early 2000s and again 2008, where a lot of market pundits came out and said, ‘that’s the end of 10 percent a year for stocks,”’ said Rich Weiss, the Los Angeles-based senior portfolio manager at American Century Investments. “Stocks have done what they almost always have done and proved yet again that even with the 2008 disaster, they return 7, 8 percent a year annualized."

[On October 11, 2007, I sold some AMZN at 95 for about a triple of shares bought in 2005.  It closed at 939 today.]

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