I don't get the point of these. Index funds win most of the time, and when they don't index funds still win once you count the amount of time and effort needed to marginally beat them.
Set it and forget it.
Set it and forget it.
I think probably this only makes sense if you want to be able to liquidate your assets at any time without having to worry about taking a tremendous loss if the market is down.
The bid/ask of instruments become illogical. Bad trade data in the live feed won't be in your historical data.
Intraday during a liquidity drop is mostly based on your relationship with your broker. How they handle margin calls will decide if your trades survive.
For example, traders have had margin calls on option spreads with a known fixed risk at the time of opening. But the individual legs of the trades were making very incorrect markets, so the broker algorithms issued margin calls and liquidated at the worst time possible.
Wealth is a marker of ones assets relative to others -- if everyone has the same wealth then no-one is wealthy.
What have I missed here?
You have defined wealth as "having more than someone else".
They have defined wealth as "easily able to meet needs and wants".
In that light, both of you are making correct arguments to your own definitions.
Our true source of wealth is our output, which is the product of (work * productivity).
See Krugman’s story about the capitol hill baby-sitting coop:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
An arbitrary authority decides on a unit of a resource that shouldn't have fixed value should have fixed value, and his solution is to introduce inflation... I suppose when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Winning is defined as increasing consumption. Everyone can have access to more of something. For instance, there are more books available to everyone. (Trying to think of a neutral, apolitical item).
That is, not everyone is in the stock market. MOST are not in the stock market.
Even more are not in the stock market in any appreciable, day-to-day way. If my 401k went up 100x, I'd still have to go to work and budget because my 401k is not liquid.
Depending on the report you read, between one third and one half of americans couldn't come up with $2,000 in an emergency if they needed it. The cost of most goods could not rise or people would starve.
The stock market going up makes no difference to a majority of america.
If you have 50k in a 401k and your funds double (a more reasonable increase, but still absurdly well)... so what? The point is, the stock market is a terrible metric of how their wealth is doing for a great many people. Enough people that drastic upward movements will only affect the prices of higher-end items because it will not immediately inject cash into people's lives who are living paycheck to paycheck (or nearly are) and need to buy food.