The Most Import Investing Principle of All...
$905,956
Hidden within the number you see above lies a remarkable lesson on the most import investing principle of all — a lesson that should make even the most die-hard procrastinator change his ways.
It all starts back in the early 1960s with Ralph, the single unluckiest investor in the entire world. (We all feel that way sometimes, don't we?) Starting in 1963, he put $2,000 once a year into the stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 index — but his timing was so terrible that he chose the worst day of the year every time! Incredibly, he invested at the exact top of the market every year — and kept it up for 10 years. (After that, he let it ride.)
As of March 1, 2000, his total of $20,000 would have grown to $905,956.
But Ralph's brother-in-law Darth started investing $2,000 a year in 1973, right after Ralph quit. To everyone's astonishment, especially Ralph's, Darth turned out to be the world's luckiest investor. Every year, he picked the absolute bottom of the market to plunk down his $2,000. And to stack the odds in Darth's favor even more, he kept up this stupendous performance for 20 years, investing twice as much and twice as long as Ralph.
Guess what? As of that same March 1, 2000, Darth's 40 grand would be worth $28,014 less than Ralph's stake — $877,942 vs. $905,956. Imagine! Darth put in twice the money, and his annual return was far higher, yet Ralph licked him fair and square. Moral: Forget market timing! Timing and luck are nice, but you can make more money just getting started now. — Louis Rukeyser, December 2000.
I'm sure this story is fictitious. But the investment data points are real; and this performance can be easily reproduced in your IRA, plus or minus a few years. Simply dollar-cost average (invest the same dollar amount on a regular basis, like $500 every three months or 10% out of every paycheck) into a low-cost S&P 500 Index fund. The S&P 500 Index is comprised of many of the biggest and best U.S. businesses, is diversified and naturally self-correcting — the best new companies in their industrial classification periodically replace merged and troubled issues. Because the economy goes through boom-and-bust business cycles, the S&P 500 Index also goes through up and down price cycles. Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) allows you to buy more shares when prices are low and less at higher prices, which yields a lower average cost basis for your investment (the break-even price) than the average for that investment's trading range; and that makes it much easier to sell at a profit in some future upturn.
I believe the most important investment principle in this story is to start early and have a tried-and-true investment strategy like dollar-cost averaging into an index fund that can survive volatile market swings and that is likely to see higher prices sooner-or-later. In time, DCA can yield superior returns that are based on normal boom-and-bust cycles in our (U.S.) growth biased economy.