Your Investments Should Be Experienced
Prefer to listen rather than read? Pair this post with Deliberate Money Moves Podcast: Your Investments Should Be Experienced.
When investing, it is easy to be attracted to the various vehicles, sectors, and strategies that surround us. Wall Street (and other financial agitators) knows this and they invent new angles every day with the primary goal of getting into your pocket.
Fortunately there are stable investment philosophies that have worked over the long run - since even the first corporations were founded. We can look at such long-run performance to know where we should invest going forward.
Steady Performance History
Company ownership has always produced stable, and higher long-term returns while company lending provided a more stable source of income. By simply combining these two concepts in the form of stocks and bonds, we can create a strategy whose risk experience has a long and stable track record.
Unfortunately, we can’t know which companies will do well and which will go out of business. But we can accumulate a lot of them very cheaply using mutual funds and ETFs. This diversified approach allows the big winners to outweigh the big losers.
The Investment Experience: I Dare You to Be Boring!
If we have faith that the future of the world includes continued growth, patience to see value come forward over time, and discipline to stick to our long-term risk structure in the downturns, we can use the markets to achieve wealth.
Successful investors know this. But, almost by definition, they take an entirely “boring” approach, so we don’t really hear much from them.
They have no sexy stories to tell at cocktail parties. They have only the wealth they have nourished and grown by remaining invested through market downturns so they may enjoy the market growth that has always followed.
Walk Away from the Craze
Chasing the latest strategy or the exclusive financial product is a great way to go broke. Almost no one has become rich by bouncing from fad to fad.
In other words, you don’t have to experience everything directly. You may also gain knowledge by what others have experienced and the boring upward-sloping long-term trend of stock market growth can be the most powerful force in your Financial Plan.