Humans Are Horrible Investors
How bad is the average investor? The average investor actually ends up with less than half the market return over long periods of time. This is true for many advisors as well. Why is that? How can they be so bad? The graph below shows the most recent 20-year study by Dalbar, Inc. As you can see, the average equity investor earned only a 3.2% annual return, compared to the U.S. stock market (S&P 500 Index) which had an 8.2% return. How could actual investors have lagged behind by a whopping 5% per year over that time frame?
- December 16, 2010
- Investing
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