Reblog: The Individual Investor’s Edge
“The goal of the non-professional should not be to pick winners – neither he nor his “helpers” can do that – but should rather be to own a cross-section of businesses that in aggregate are bound to do well. A low-cost S&P 500 index fund will achieve this goal.” — Warren Buffett, 2013 Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders
As Albert Einstein wisely stated, compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world: He who understands it earns it while he who doesn’t pay it. The vast majority of individuals who take the initiative to accumulate savings should follow Warren Buffett’s advice on using index funds and dollar cost averaging to achieve satisfactory returns over time. For those earning at or above the median wage in the United States, it would be very difficult to end up poor if one simply saves ten to fifteen percent of gross income and dollar cost averages into the S&P 500 over several decades.
But what about non-professional individual investors who want to achieve better than average results? In the short run, the stock market resembles a manic-depressive character who bids up prices one day and sends them down the following day without much of a reason for the change in sentiment. Benjamin Graham’s “Mr. Market” character perfectly personifies the psychology of financial markets in the short run.