John Bogle screwed a lot of people in the late 90’s and early 2000s with his grandfatherly buy and hold indexing shtick. People were comforted by him and trusted him and loved the idea that it could be that easy. Absurd.
Bogle published Common Sense on Mutual Funds in 1999 and was all over financial television and the magazines hawking Vangaurd Index Funds. Meanwhile, if you bought the SP500 ($SPX, $SPY) in 1999 with your retirement money and dollar cost averaged, not only havent you grown your nest egg but you are likely in the red.
Yet holding trades for extended periods of time can be extremely profitable if you are smart about it and put in the time and effort required. This is how you build real wealth.
But it requires vision and finding big opportunities, researching them so that you are the expert, trading around them intelligently, managing risk well and staying with them, despite adversity and your own impulse to take profits too soon, for extended period of time while the story unfolds. Not easy.
Its not this lazy fantasy that anyone can do it which will only be true during fleeting periods of abundance and good fortune for everybody.
There are real experts out there like Todd Sullivan who can help you and provide ideas but at the end of the day it is your money on the line, those who want to beat you are cunning and there is no net.
Everything including buy and hold is a trade.
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