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Comment by ketamine__ | Hacker News Reader

The returns you can make in securities over ten to twenty years is much more impressive than bonds.

Key word being "can". On average securities have a much better return than bonds, but they also have a much higher risk of a large drop in value.

On an individual basis perhaps but not if you're in an S&P 500 ETF.

Go lookup a graph of the sp500 from 2000 to 2010. There are no guarantees that it will always trend up.

Go look at that same graph from 2007 to 2021. If you bought in at the top of the 2008 bubble, you'd have tripled your money by now.

Unless you're planning on retiring in the next 10 years, buy stocks.

The S&P is unusually pricey at the moment though.

It's only unusually pricey if you expect to always live in a world of 3-4% interest rates. We're no longer living in that world, though.

The thing is, you could say the same thing at nearly any point between 1999 and 2021, and be right, and it would still have been a good idea to invest into the S&P.

As a long term investor though thinking 'this too shall pass' is quite a good strategy which means at some point the high prices will fade and you will be left with your dividends and earnings which at current prices are not giving you much of a yield.

Also I've been following Jeremy Grantham who is now preaching that the end is nigh. He has a good track record https://youtu.be/RYfmRTyl56w

He recommends emerging markets and value stocks by the way where valuations are more reasonable.

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