Despite the warnings from the likes of Warren Buffett and others individual investors have been pouring large amounts of money into bond funds for the past few months. It turns out last fall was a great time to be a buyer of stocks and individual investors were then pulling money out of stock funds at a frantic pace.
It’s just this kind of decision making that leads individual investors to do far worse than the 3.5% lag behind the indexes I’ve written about. Recent studies suggest that, in practice, investors’ realize about 6% less than whatever fund their investing in due to bad market timing and chasing performance
Add in those fund fees and adviser expenses and, all told, “the true cost of financial advice” may be close to 9%, which is basically what the indexes have averaged over the past 25 years. And they wonder why can’t make any money in the markets.
This is why committing to an effective system and refusing to abandon it come hell or high water is essential to investing success.