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Friday, March 9, 2012

Why Investing in Capital Markets is waste of time!

As discussed in my earlier post, How to make money in Stock Market that, it is not so easy to make money in capital markets, am sure you must be thinking, "What a loser I am!"
So, most of the investors today are trying to become rich by either "Active" Investing or Investing in "Passive" instrument.

There are two basic ways to invest your money in stocks:
1. Active
You invest your money in select stocks or in funds which try to beat the market and continually monitor and adjust your portfolio in order to get good returns.
2. Passive
You invest your money in a passive index fund or ETFs which track the index, thus incurring the minimum investing fees and just trying to achieve market returns.

Why Active Investing is a Waste of Time
To be able to consistently beat the market in terms of risk adjusted returns, you have to be either
1. A fucking genius
2. Very fucking lucky
The probability of you being a big fucking genius or at least smart enough to beat the market is very low, tending to zero. There are many very intelligent people who have tried to do it, and have failed miserably, including ME!
There is one who has done very well – Warren Buffett, and he definitely isn’t a proponent of active investing, at least not in the form that most of you practice it. Buffett swears by the power of passive investing, even though he doesn’t do it himself.
Buffett can be considered to be the most successful investor on Earth, and he has always believed in value investing and passive (indexed) investing. If he says something, I’m surely inclined to believe him. Even history shows that passive investing is the best way to invest in the long term.
Coming to the second point, the probability that you will make a good amount of money by just being lucky is also quite low. There are seven billion people in the world. Assuming that there are 10000 people who will be able to beat the market by sheer luck, the probability that you will be one of them is 1 in 700,000. The odds are just too low to even try.
Buffett is probably both – a genius and very lucky, and as you can see, there is only one of him. If you believe that you are smarter than him, or the many smart people who have tried to beat the market, and failed, you need to read this.

The only easy way to make a risk-free killing in the market is to have some informational advantage (inside information), which I assure you, that you as a normal investor, never will.
Here are some other ways to make money in the stock market.
Stop trying to beat the market by acting on ‘sure’ tips by your broker or your grandmother’s neighbor’s watchman, just because someone you know got lucky and made some money in the market, and now you feel that if that idiot could, you can too. Instead, invest in some equities or commodities index, and divert your energy to something productive, and actually create something of value. You will have a much better chance of getting rich that way.
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Note: I know that you probably think that you are the next Warren Buffett, and that you are smarter than all the idiots who couldn’t make shitloads of money in the stock market, including me, and that you are going to take a shot at it anyway. Here’s a tip: You aren’t. And don’t.

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