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Comment by drsim | Hacker News Reader

It’s scary headlines like this: ‘trampled’, ‘crashes’, that put off less informed, risk averse individuals on lower incomes/ net worth, from investing in stocks.

It’s a shame, as ETFs, and hell, index funds if you must, outperform savings on a 3 year or even less horizon.

Yes, my portfolio dropped 7% this month. I’m still up 6% YTD and 13% in the last 12 months.

My horizon is well over 5 years. It would be an easy way to slow or even reduce my net worth if I were to put it all in a savings account.

Yet this is what a lot of folks do, frightened by scary bombastic headlines without a balanced long sighted story.

Current stock performance is very notable and newsworthy, yet lacks any narrative outside of short term performance.

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Japan is notable because they're one of the clearest indicators that 'stocks always go up' is simply not true. This [1] is the Japanese stock market (Nikkei225) inflation adjusted. It reached its highest point in December 1989. It's unfortunate that that table ends in 2013 because obviously a huge amount has changed since then, but even in unadjusted currency [2], its current price is lower than in 1989.

For those who might not know in 1989 many were expecting Japan to imminently become the largest economy in the world, overcoming even the US. Then stagflation hit for reasons that are still not completely clear.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=li7

[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/.N225

From an investor point of view, this is a wrong way of looking at it.

Companies can do 2 things with their revenues: reinvest into the company (stock price grows), or take it out as profit (dividends, value of company stays the same).

Only looking at stock price is too narrow minded. Maybe companies don't want to grow and just take the profit.

For the case of Japan, let's take a look at stock price + dividend reinvestments: Nikkei 225 Total Return (N225TR) https://www.investing.com/indices/nikkei-225-total-return-hi...

And what do you know, it grows.

The largest time frame I could find on the site you linked is a month. I was able to find a calculator for this exact thing here. [1] Adjusted for inflation, investing from December 1989 to February 2013 (latest date available on the site) an investment in the Nikkei, with a reinvestment of dividends in Yen, would yield a return of -6.2%. It'd be -48% had one chosen to invest to/from USD, owing to the collapse in exchange rate.

[1] - https://dqydj.com/nikkei-return-calculator/

So don't invest in 1989 and sell in 2013, any other time is more than fine.

Did you deliberatly pick those dates? I think so. Here is the chart: https://www.nikkei.co.jp/nikkeiinfo/en/global_services/nikke...

Let me pick the dates then: 2013 to 2023, annualized return inflation adjusted: 10%

1989 was picked as it was the peak of the Japanese economy, the point from which people thought the economy could only continue to grow even larger, because that's what it'd always done - basically the same sort of stuff you're espousing here. But of course that's not what happened - anybody who invested at that time (or in many years around) would have seen nothing but losses over the decades to come. The end date was a typo, of course I picked 2023, the latest date the site supports. Do it 1989-2013 and you'd have lost 64% of your money!

Not only is markets declining longterm an obviously possible outcome, but as population levels start to decline, it's likely to become more the norm than the exception. When your population is growing, each year all businesses naturally grow. When your population is shrinking, all businesses naturally shrink each year. Fertility collapse is going to shake the world like nothing before.

1989 until 2023 gives a 8.765% positive return with inflation.

If I understand your numbers correctly, that’s like, ~0.25% a year. Is that accurate?

I was going from December, as per my earlier comment. In any case, if we're engaging in good faith then of course even 8.8% after near to 40 years is not what people mean when they talk about the market being a stable investment. The comment that started our little thread said,

---

It’s a shame, as ETFs, and hell, index funds if you must, outperform savings on a 3 year or even less horizon.

Yes, my portfolio dropped 7% this month. I’m still up 6% YTD and 13% in the last 12 months.

My horizon is well over 5 years. It would be an easy way to slow or even reduce my net worth if I were to put it all in a savings account.

---

He's clearly still expecting reasonable returns on mid-range time frames, which is what people mean when suggesting the market always goes up - not an annualized 0.25%, let alone loss, for the next 40 years.

It's scary headlines like this that make me push more of my money into index funds (can't be bothered to deal in stocks with the increased effort required).

But... the problem with being on lower incomes / net worth is that there is a highly increased risk that you're forced to pull money out of stocks / funds when they are low because you have little or nothing else to take from to cover unexpected expenses (and you will have a lot more of those when you can't afford to act and instead always react). So if you're living anywhere close to the limit of your income, you really are better off with a savings account.

Even worse is the minute-to-minute reporting of “AAPL down 17!” “GM below $40!” .. as if the media is actively eroding our statistical intuition. I used to have a broker who would always quote the spot price of the stock after every stock name. It drove me crazy because it signalled a kind of superficial, counterproductive mastery of the state of the market.

They've always been doing this.

Every time the market is down 10%, news outlets can't shout loud enough how the end times are upon us. Various doomsayers come out of the woodwork and point at how they predicted this crash, but conveniently gloss over the 20 other crashes they predicted and that never happened.

The media fanning the flames when the markets are down is something you have to get used to or simply ignore. Tney have no clue, they just want the clicks :D

I think it's also the jargon-laden complexity of investing. A safe choice for a lower income investor is called "FTSE All-World UCITS ETF (VWRP)", which is meaningless mumbo-jumbo to most people.

I think you’re right, and even though it scares me a lot seeing my portfoilio down like this, I still try to see it as an opportunity to buy at a discount. It means I have to hold onto some more liquid funds, but i think it can turn out to be well worth it if you’re long term.

You can only buy at a discount if you are holding cash to start with....

>It’s a shame, as ETFs, and hell, index funds if you must, outperform savings on a 3 year or even less horizon.

I think sentiments like yours are just as bad as the sentiments you find aggravating.

Yes, investments can produce bigger returns than simple savings, but the keyword is there is no guarantee. Unlike savings which are guaranteed by the bank and the government and will grow at a known rate, investments are not.

Investments are thus akin to gambling. Whatever money you put in to investing should be money you are willing to never see again, no matter how low the chances of such a thing happening.

Most people are not willing to effectively or theoretically throw their money away, rightfully or otherwise, and thus find saving more appealing than investing. There is nothing wrong with choosing to save instead of invest if that's what lets you sleep well at night.

If you lose all your money from index fund investments, the US economy has completely collapsed and no amount of FDIC insurance will protect your savings.

Doesn't have to be all, most people simply do not want to lose any significant sum of money to games.

I repeat for emphasis: Money you invest must be money you are okay losing. Most people are not okay potentially losing their money.

I appreciate your comment and share the sentiment. Yet I think about temporarily reducing the amount of stock in my portfolio, since one of the historic recession indicators is in pre-recession territory for quite some time [1]. In any case, recessions must not go hand in hand with a bear market, and even if so, we don't know how deep it will go and for how long.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y Click on "Max". Observe recessions in grey.

The GDP and the number of open jobs isn't indicative of a coming recession to me. In my opinion, The FED will likely cause a recession when they start cutting rates because business will start cutting back spending in anticipation of cheaper credit. The faster they cut the shorter the recession will be.

This is how Wall Street makes their money. They use media to manufacture peak fear and buy the lower bottoms. This happens every single correction. Same thing with the phony analysts, majority of whom just follow the trends and spew out higher price predictions basically manufacturing a buying frenzy with seemingly little to no research. They were doing this with Nvidia for months before it topped out.

If everybody invests in these funds, then the thing is artificial yes? Are there enough people betting against it to keep the thing going up and to the right? What happens if everybody invests in The Fund?

Stocks just went on sale.

> ETFs, and hell, index funds if you must, outperform savings on a 3 year or even less horizon

Sure, they always do until they don't, right?

How is the US immune from having a Nikkei-like era? Not until earlier this year did it re-reach the highs originally set in 1989 -- 35 years!

Probably not immune but the US economy was able to latch onto software, which is still where world economy is heading, especially with AI leading the trends now.

Same here, my portfolio is up 8% YTD and 21% 1Y.

I wonder if it's by design.

>I’m still up 6% YTD and 13% in the last 12 months.

For now. It can still go lower.

The idea behind long term investment is that you hold a diversified basket of assets, add a little regularly and hold for >10 years. This smoothes out the various drawdowns quite a bit.

The only way it could not be is if this is "the end"

A country's financial markets can be moribund over the long term, without any sort of apocalypse.

You could buy into the Nikkei at JP¥30,000 in 1988 and sell today for JP¥30,000

Invest in the FTSE 100 from 1984 until 2000, you saw 500% growth - a 10.5% annual return. Invest from 2000 until today and you saw 20% growth, a 0.7% annual return.

The precise causes are debatable - but it's completely possible for a rich, western-style economy, with no great wars or huge natural disasters, to just sort of stop growing.

To add to your examples -- take a look at any "emerging markets" ETF, say SCHE. For the last twenty years it has just bounced around without going up. As someone who assumed that global inequality would slowly diffuse away, that poor countries would become rich, that we would all sing Kumbaya, and that this would be a way to profit modestly from that "inevitability", I have been surprised. Luckily it isn't a huge part of my portfolio at this point.

Financial advisors constantly tell you to be globally diversified, but, as far as I can tell, only America goes up. I'm starting to think it's more of a monetary phenomenon than anything "real": America prints the money, so Americans can buy stocks and American stocks go up, and everybody from around the world risks life and limb to get to said place with the money. And, Brand America may not be as shiny as it used to be, but I don't see anything else that can challenge too strongly. China for actually getting shit done, say in Africa, perhaps: They'll build the trains. But it'll still be USD that people want to hold. At some level it's like LVMH. It blows my mind that Bernard Arnault is one of the richest men in the world, on the basis of bullshit handbags for rich people. But, when it comes to money, the fashions followed by rich people are the only thing that matters.

>As someone who assumed that global inequality would slowly diffuse away, that poor countries would become rich, that we would all sing Kumbaya, and that this would be a way to profit modestly from that "inevitability", I have been surprised.

Yes, the data in Africa—the classic target of such hope—is very depressing reading. From 1961 to 2015, real GDP per capita in Africa grew by 1.1% annually (!), compared to 3.9% for Asia, 1.7% for the Americas, and 2.2% for Europe. Growth from 2001 to 2010 of 2.9% is included in that figure; it was the first decade in that period in which Africa outgrew any other continent. <https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6zlj6k/countries_by...>

It can always go lower, but this is called bear porn.

Path of least resistance is higher; too high too fast for too long causes people to lever up and this blows up sometimes, like in the past few sessions.

Question is how much of the carry trade will unwind now. Regulators will socialize the losses if it happens all at once, that you can be sure of.

Sure, but I wasn't talking about long term, I meant to point out that it's foolish to say "but my folio still up tho?", especially this early while things are still unraveling.

It's actually very good to look at the longer time frames to put the current panic in a context. Average for the sp500 over the last 50 years is ~8% yoy. If you're still up 6% YTD, there's literally nothing to worry about. You might be at 0% today and 6% again tomorrow with how these things unravel.

The point is that over even fairly short time it will go higher more than it goes lower.

yeah - especially when you see it pop back up today.

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