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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware that most hedge funds are considered excellent if they average 6% annual return.

However did you look at my table for QQQ returns from the last 11 years? Only two years did not average more than 6%. If you bought QQQ on 1/5/2007 and held until now you'd be up a whopping 205% over 11 years. That's also not including the awesome QQQ dividend yield, or even more compounded with a DRIP (dividend re-investment).

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Hey, if you bought MSFT yesterday at 2:09 pm and sold it at exactly 2:29 PM you could have made a 2% return in just 20 minutes! So amazing. Now just do that every day and you could make 1000% in a year! ... is the logic you keep using.

Nope. The difference is you don't need to time the market when investing over long periods of time. Timing the market requires luck. Investing for 10+ years doesn't.

If you are using the above logic of 'if you bought in 2008 and held today' - then it's about market timing, not fundamentals.

Anyhow - you cannot win over time, unless you can beat Deep Blue over chess.

And by 'win' I mean outperform the market.

Of course, some people will, some won't - but it's a game of probability there.

Again - unless you specifically have more information that the person you are trading with - then you're throwing darts at the board.

99.9% of Retail Traders do not have any special information WRT their investments. Ergo, they are not really investing.

When people say "timing the market", they mean short term timing. Holding for almost a decade is not market timing.

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