One of my favorite sayings is "better lucky than smart". I firmly believe that little nugget. I know LOTS of people that are way smarter than I - but they've never been lucky.
So with that said --- I'd just posted about whether or not to take your gains and try to rebalance your accounts etc. and here comes an article in SeekingAlpha that has actually charted this. What the author has done is to calculate the net of doing a DRIP (dividend re-investment plan) vs taking the dividends and trying to buy the shares at lower prices etc...
I'll tell you without reading the article yourselves -- the DRIP beat the other methods. What I really want you to see is the beginning investment --- then seeing the net at 5 year - 10 year - 20 year... SO what I really want you all to see is how much money GROWS given some time. That's the main crux of all my posts!!
In the END -- i.e., the last 5 years of the 25 year calculation -- the withdrawal and reinvest method was a whopping $801 ahead of the DRIP (automatic) method. That is more LUCKY than anything else... because we all know that most of us wouldn't be as "calculated" as this little test was. We'd forget - or we'd switch gears - or whatever...
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1261...g_income&ifp=0