With the small recent drop in the market, several threads have popped up questioning whether to move money, pull out of the market, go to lower risk, etc. That has happened several times in the few years that I've been on these forums.
The general rule is that we're not smarter than the market, and our instincts are wrong more often than they're right.
The easy way to see this is with data. If you make a prediction or claim you're buying a stock, give the details. The market will be 20% lower by March 30, I bought Facebook on 2/7/18 because I think the company looks solid, etc.
That way people can see how these calls panned out. With a large enough data pool, we're likely to see that it averages out to no better than guessing. But seeing that will be very helpful for people the next time they start to get nervous and think they (or others) can predict where the market is going.
And if you consistently make correct calls, while it is probably due to lucky guessing, we'll at least have that data too.
In this way, after-the-fact claims can also be disregarded. "I totally called the drop last week and moved everything out," etc., can be dismissed because we'll have a practice of announcing such calls in detail before/as they happen.
I think this will be a helpful addition to the Investor Alley forum.
