I have to add this thought while my little finnies are typing.
What people have to get their head around is that the market is ALWAYS going to go up and down. But if you have a market like this year - it's up 13% or whatever (I don't honestly know 'cause I don't really give a ****)… and next year it only goes up 5%…. and then it's down 4% and then it's up 9% (the market average over time)… YOU'RE GOING TO BE AHEAD… and if you think about that's just capital gain…. you're up way more than that if you factor in a 5% dividend.
That's why I like to simply look at TOTAL RETURN over time…. It's not any more complicated than that. I want to double my money about every 5 to 7 years… even if I have to suffer a downturn in between. I can only use history as a GUIDE - it's not a guarantee of the future. I just have to have some trust that the future will be SIMILAR to the past.
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