Quote from jem:
I find it interesting that people on the whole seem to accept the market efficiency hypothesis, and at the same time accept the theory that buy and hold is a legitimate money making strategy. Should not market efficiencies wipe out returns to investors?
To me they are both B.S. put forth by institutions and fund companies trying to trick people into "investing responsibly." I am sure that if you want to go back and read Grant Noble's book. Which I read years ago you would see that you adjust for inflation the Dow has not gone up since the 1929 peak. And if you figure out how many Dow stocks went down before being kicked out to the Dow, you probably lost money if you were a Dow indexer after inflation.
So my statement is if you are a little doubious of biased claims and studies, you can invest and hope or you can figure out how to trade. But there is nothing in the universe that states the market will be up 10 20 30 or 40 years from now, for every stat I have heard from the Wall Street B.S. machine, I can create the equal but opposite stat. Now if you missed the 20 worst trading days of the last five years through market timing your portfolio would be up __ %.
Now back to the point of the thread, I think the shorter time frames have gotten tougher because the absolute range has gotten smaller, so slippage and commsions are a greater percent of the trade.
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