Do you want to be right... or do you want to make money?

• "The economic recovery is fake because it's based on debt and loose monetary policy.  It will all soon collapse and the next bear market will be worse than the last one."

• "The national debt is a bomb waiting to explode.  It's unsustainable and will cripple the economy, plunging us into recession."

 

• "All this Q.E. that the Fed is doing is creating a giant asset bubble.  It's about to pop and the economy will collapse."

 

• "With all the money the Fed's been printing, the dollar will be devalued to zero and we are going to have hyperinflation."
  

Do you subscribe to any of these beliefs?

If you do, I hope you didn't put any money where your mouth was, otherwise you would have missed the close to 300% return the S&P 500 logged between it's closing low in March 2009 and March 2018.  That's an annualized return of over 16% per year.

Yet we've heard the same thing year after year from the perma-bears since 2009.

I'm not writing this to debate whether that stuff is true or not.  Maybe it is.  But the fact is the stock market tripled while they sang their tunes like a broken record.

Eventually they will be right and will proclaim "See, I told you so!" like the broken clock that's right twice a day.

Who knows?  Someone reading this article next year might say "but all of that stuff really did happen, you idiot!"

But none of that would change the fact that the S&P 500  went up 300% in the meantime, having left plenty of money to be made.

But none of that would change the fact that the S&P 500  went up 300% in the meantime, having left plenty of money to be made.


Let me tell you my story.  When I graduated from school and started my career, it was the midst of the great recession and stocks were plunging.  After they started going up, I was reading all kinds of stuff about the "fake economic recovery" and how the Fed was inflating another giant bubble.  Convinced of this, I refused to meaningfully invest in the stock market for many years after.  The next bear market was always around the corner for both me and the perma-bears I was following.

I still think the ideas behind their arguments are valid though.

But what was inexcusable was plowing a large portion of my money into a low yielding online savings account that couldn't even keep pace with inflation, because "this will all collapse soon", while the stock market rose double digits year after year.

Instead of assessing market conditions and making some money off of the giant unfolding bull market, I let myself become blinded by ideology as I sat on the sidelines.

Why didn't I just get in?

Even if my hypothesis were to come true and it would all fall apart, there are ways to limit the damage.

I could have used all of the money I missed out on to make a larger down payment, and pay half the mortgage I'm paying now.

Could have, would have, should have.


Don't be like me.  Put more weight on what is actually happening instead of what you believe should be happening.

Do you want to be right or do you want to make money?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."     - John Maynard Keynes

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