No need to rub salt in the wound on a daily basis. We all know the ticker and can do math. junioroldtimer may still win. With only 22 posts, may also be a troll. If not a troll, certainly has some big cojones laying it all out there for the world to know and watch.
Good luck junioroldtimer!
Yeah, the least fun part about this thread has been Sol's odd obsession and kinda fanatical glee in attacking the OP.
Frankly, @brandino29, I find it the best part. Sol responds with logic, experience, intelligence, and reason. His is helping others understand the fallacy of market timing so that they don't make the same mistake(s). Some of us old FIRE folks hang around here specifically to help other people reach their own FIRE goals more efficiently. Criticize him all you want, within the bounds of the forum rules, of course, but ignore his teaching at your own peril.
And @COEE, what you're calling big cojones look like small potatoes to me. I actually exhaled when I saw the amount of money the OP was playing with risking gambling. People have blown more money on depreciators such as cars and other motorized toys. This will be a painful lesson, but he will hopefully make a complete recovery and this experiment will prove valuable to him, and to many, in the long run. And we're all about the long run here, aren't we?
Agreed.
What I don't really understand is the level of risk for the magnitude of potential reward.
I mean, realistically, how much is he expecting the market to actually drop? Say it drops as much as 50%, which would be astounding. The max he gains is, what??? a few tens of thousands?
And if the wheels fall off the entire economy so badly that it drops that significantly, I can imagine it would be pants-shittingly terrifying to dump back in every cent of your savings while the news screams every day of the collapse of the entire economy and constantly warns of impending violent conflict.
I'm really only slightly dramatizing, or maybe I'm not, you never know what news outlets will report. I remember in 2013 when CNN had a constant stream of warnings that a North Korean nuclear attack was practically imminent.
A massive 50% drop in the market would make news agencies apoplectic. The fear rhetoric would be overwhelming, which would make it extremely difficult to assess what the likelihood of a recovery would be.
I can see someone faltering in dumping it all back in at a time if extreme economic uncertainty when cash might be king. In that unlikely case, the real benefit of this plan is having cashed out before the crash if you end up needing to use your cash without having to sell at a loss.
The opportunity to buy back in low just doesn't produce all that much of a benefit in the grand scheme.
It's a move of taking on a very high risk of losing out on gains for the very low possibility of gaining a few tens of thousands, but only if you have an iron sphincter and an absolute and total faith in the economy recovering from an astronomical drop.
Or...it could dip 10-20% as it has in the past and the gains will be even more non-significant, so why even bother??
Regardless, there's no permutation of this plan that I can see where it would impact someone's lifetime savings by very much. By the time OP hits FI, the affects of normal market fluctuations should alter their net worth more than this move will.
If there's a "big win" scenario here, I'm just not seeing it.