This. I’ve been investing professionally for almost 20 years. You know those internet memes with the bell curve iqs…. For much of my career I was contrarian to this view but after watching the government responses to repeated financial asset crises, you don’t want to be positioned too far from what the voting masses will demand if they see their home prices or 401ks sharply decline. Can governments keep this up forever? Logic would say no but then again doomsayers have been arguing about the unsustainability of trends for all five decades of my life. The “smartest” investors I know always see a climax around the corner when finally all the accumulated problems come to roost. Guess what. Last fifty years you didn’t want to be sitting out of assets holding cash. This stuff is hard.

It’s really really hard as you get older and your hopefully accumulated savings are high relative to your current income and your expected remaining working life earnings.

In your 20s you can ride up a bubble, lose it all, and chalk it up to a cruddy learning experience. Later in life it gets exponentially harder because mistakes are permanent and irrecoverable. You can play the game and risk it in what seem like expensive assets. Or you can sit it out and fall behind without any compounding to create wealth and offset inflation. The latter option isn’t really an option unless you start with so much wealth that you can just spend down principal being eroded by inflation year after year and still have enough.

Good luck!