(05-31-2019 03:02 PM)Redwingtom Wrote: The market may be good now and you may be making more return due to the buybacks, but that could change in a year and result in losses to offset the current gains. If you're like me, you're well over a decade from retirement. There's no guarantee any gains I'm making now will be there when it comes time to cash in.
This is where 'what people think they know' misleads them.
First of all, you'd be hard-pressed to find ANY 10 year period in the past century where the (dividends reinvested) rate of return on any significant US index (the DJIA, the S&P, the NASDAQ) was negative, much less lower than inflation or the rate of return on treasury bills or CDs.... Of course there is no guarantee... If we decide to become socialist or start nationalizing companies, people could lose everything... but those are conscious choices we would be making as a country to let the government do that to us.
Second, Let's be honest... there's no guarantee that social security will be there either. Why do we put so much greater faith in a program that has been cut and cut and cut and cut over our lifetimes than we do in one that has yet to fail us?
Finally, any investment adviser worth 2 cents would tell you that the shorter your investment window, the more conservative you need to be. If you're 10 years from retirement, you should have a lot of your money in fixed income, which would do very well in the event of a downturn in the stock market.... and much less in stocks.... so you may still 'make more money' even if the stock market is lower.
Though unless you plan on not only retiring in 10 years, but dying in 10.1, your horizon should be a bit longer than just 'retirement day'.
I don't mean this as a knock on you Tom... but it's a very commonly repeated fallacy.