This is a big reason I could never be a day trader even if it did somehow beat the average. Too much second guessing and rear view mirror heartburn. You make some good points about not accounting for future benefits with a decision. Same could be said for the old house, maybe an earthquake levels it and I got out just in time.
Exactly. Or a major employer in the area shuts down or lays people off and property values melt. I don't know. Could be anything.
One popular example comes in the saying of "if only I'd bought Apple stock in the 80s", but absolutely nobody could have seen the future of what Apple would become, even the people who try to look like visionaries because they took a gamble and won. And those hypothetical ROI calculations on Apple stock are just that: hypothetical. It's highly unlikely that anybody bought at the bottom and decided to hold out for 30 or however many years. Most people who did well with that stock sold it at some point, made their money, and moved on with life. Technically, this is how it works with all shares: you sell them at some point and move on with life. Eventually you die, and maybe what's left goes to your kids or somebody else, who also sell them at some point and move on with life. Same could be said for houses: in 30 years, that house will be worth a whole lot more, but that doesn't mean the best decision would have been to live in it forever.
Besides, there's no guarantee that, given a higher return on that house, you wouldn't have just rolled in into an even larger house that became a money pit. You really never know. It's like some people who think winning the lottery will set them up for life, only to discover it was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Those stories tend to be over-hyped (some people are very successful with lottery winnings), but for those people, it somehow morphed into death and destruction.
And it is easy to forget! Sometimes I wish I could make even a small windfall playing stocks, but I'm still in it for index investing. The returns aren't super impressive, but my high savings rate is where it's really at. The people I know who are chasing high returns often get slapped with the realities of "high risk". Most of them are old and still working. You don't need high returns if your savings are outpacing those earnings in the first place. If you are handling your money wisely, you don't need to get lucky with some unusually high return.
I could go on, it's such an interesting subject. It is slightly unnatural for most people, so we tend to be our own worst enemies :)
