Thumb rule -: As long as you know that you got lucky, then it’s good 
Please just don’t attribute this success to any talent or skills 
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Yeah, stay passive for life now, and you’ll always be able to tell the story “WHEN I time the market I ALWAYS won” when the topic comes up. Don’t give away that card. 
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This reminds me of the first time I went to a casino. I won something like 50 euros.
For a couple of years, I was proud to tell others that I had beaten the casino
Guess what: the second time, I lost 50 euros.
There wasn’t a third time…
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That’s the cutting edge argument I was looking for 
I’ll take the win and go on with the usual, I need to live up to my name after all.
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There is: don’t try to do what even professionnals can’t do.
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Or “Time in the market beats timing the market.”
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Is there any rule of thumb or such?
A strategy that I like and follow myself is a simple core/satellite portfolio. You keep a big chunk of your portfolio (like 90%) in VT (or whatever is your target allocation), you keep buying and never touch it (the core). And with the other 10% you allow yourself to do whatever you want (the satellite, think stock-picking, market-timing, leveraged ETFs, Crypto, …).
This way, your core keeps generating returns without you having to worry, and you can still make the itching fingers happy by fooling around with your satellite with no real danger.
With this mindset, I bought 3x leveraged S&P 500 on April 9 near the low before the 90-day pause was announced (with what CHF I had lying around). Indicators were perfectly clear, markets had dropped by more than 20% and the VIX only was higher in covid and during 2008, so it was close to a no-brainer. So far it made me a neat 32% profit, but I guess we have not yet seen the end of this… I will sell when we’re back to all-time highs
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And here I am with my passive mindset of investing after salary day, getting annoyed about another missed dip.
I wonder if there is no mathematical solution for that. It seems to me to be at least closely related to the secretary problem. I should carry out an analysis on that… over 1 month, I guess the upward trend is negligible (1.08^(1/12)-1 ~= 0.6%, which drowns in the variability).
Feel ya (even if you were probably not being serious), that’s my investment regret too, having conviction but not confidence.
What a super cool thread, so much knowledge and wisdom instilled into each post.
And I feel much less alone for having done nothing at all before the world would come crashing down, and then all the most stupid panic sell/buy I preached for years to avoid at all cost and I thought I would never do.
The reality is that we are all human beings, handling our OWN money and lifetime savings, sometimes well above the million $ mark. And we mostly measure it in CHF or EUR counter value.
Seeing that dipping of 30% (if you add nominal stock value and forex effect) is fricking challenging.
What I’m doing now to avoid being caught off guard twice, is to reduce my exposure to USD and stocks, holding a larger (almost 50%) position in cash EUR/CHF.
Sadly, this man over there, is so totally unprepared and unpredictable that every outcome is possible just as a coin flip. Decidedly not an environment where investing thrives.
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Here’s something I saw today on Twitter from one of my personal heroes. Seems contradictory to the topic’s title at first, but kind of completely answers it, IMO.
(Source)
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Totally agree. But I read that ‘bond vigilantes’ did the job, rather than stock markets. He was unfazed until large US bond holders started dumping them.
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We can probably agree on “markets”, as suggested by Ben Carlson.
Just as an aside, my reply wasn’t specifically a reply to your post, just a reply in the the topic, so no need to defend yourself unless you specifically feel I was attacking one of your statements.
Markets include "the" bond market.
I did see it coming, and yet I mismanaged it too. Played it too tight, and my loaded 1e 2nd pillar failed to sell on April 1st as instructed (but managed to hit their trading day two weeks later near the lowest point), leading to some interesting ongoing discussions 
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13 posts were merged into an existing topic: Chronicles of 2025
A post was merged into an existing topic: Chronicles of 2025