LogFAQs > #950215995

Seanchan posted...

So I know there's a bunch of you in this topic that this is a hobby, so you get personal enjoyment out of the time spent and there's the thrill of "hitting it big". I also get the sense that, at least here, people are only playing with money they could afford to lose.

My question then, is, compared to just putting your money in a broad market index fund, how much more (or less) money do you think you've made trading individual stocks?

Or, to put it another way, here's my performance in my non-retirement account over the last 5 years, invested 100% in broad market mutual funds using dollar cost averaging to put in a certain amount of money every week. My beginning balance was around $150k. I made around $77k of purchases. I have around $115k of investment return (site says ~10% rate of return), for an ending balance of around $342k.

Given those numbers, do you feel I've made a good return? In the same scenario, do you feel like you could have done better getting more personally involved buying individual stocks?

All the regulars in this topic has gotten better rates of return than that BUT this topic series was started in March 2020 at the bottom of a deep bear market and we have had an amazing bull market since then. I think it's very hard to make fair comparisons until we see how this topic does in something other than a record setting bull market.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
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