OP and others, I too share this great gift for market timing. I have a good job and I'm able to save a lot of my pay every year through total badassity - biking to work in Canada in all seasons, being a non-consumer except for food. I work hard for my income so it's heartbreaking to see it flatline and - in too many cases - tank. At this rate, how can I hope to FIRE with flat-to-negative returns?
Have I had any winners? The answer is: one. A mutual fund that I've held since 2000 has returned 80% on the original investment, meaning that over 16 years I've averaged out 5% a year on it (initial investment of 12K is now 21K).
The rest? Break-even or less, meaning that I don't even keep pace with inflation. And yes, I buy things and hold them long term - sometimes too long term. I've lost big on stocks, bonds and even real estate, all on "expert" advice that I was paying for.
And when I tell anyone that I have a savings account that bears 1.75%/year interest, they laugh at me for keeping some savings there because after taxes, that doesn't keep pace with inflation either.
Well ya, but at least I'm not losing that money hand over fist like I do with other stuff?
I have several mutual funds where the MER is over 2%/year ... net cost for all management fees is 8K/yr. I dumped my second lousy financial advisor (had two advisors over 20 years) so now I'm going it alone. Scared to get out of the mutual funds which have netted about 1 to 3%/yr for the average ones, and 5%/yr for the one good one I have. If those sound like "wins", they're not, when averaged against the crap that tanked beyond belief.
So I'm trying to get out of the mutual funds and into ETFs, but I have all of my TFSA with a low-cost robo-advisor since transferring it in last August, and it's down by 1K since then, despite "averaging down" with this year's max contribution of 5.5K in mid-January. And a Vanguard ETF I bought in mid-January is now down 1K in less than a month, so I can lose more money faster on my own than with the robo-advisor. Ugh.
I am not into conspiracy theories usually, but I think the cards are stacked against savers. I think we're all chumps. I wonder what the future holds after waves of cash flow into and out of ETFs (thinking that the more cash flows into the market through ETFs, the smaller the pool of active (meaning, "I did my homework and this is a great buy") investors there are to make a difference - I think that this can only result in greater volatility. A stash of gold coins under the mattress is starting to look pretty good.
Trusting my nest egg to a financial advisor hasn't worked - I've taken advice, stayed the course, spoke up when I thought I needed to and actually managed to stem some losses as a result. But I totally suck at going it alone.
I can make money.
I can save money.
And that's about it, so I guess I have to be happy about that.