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Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

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Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#201

Post by ahelwer »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #182
ahelwer wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making the classic mistake of confusing domains exhibiting a normal distribution of outcomes (casino games) with domains exhibiting an exponential distribution of outcomes (the market). This is the sort of thinking that traps people into believing "it went up a lot, therefore it has to revert to the mean and go down" or vice versa - there is no basis for such a belief in exponential domains.

There is also no basis for such a belief in the casino games.

Certainly not in the sense of the gambler's fallacy, but you can be sure that someone's fortunes from playing casino games will exhibit mean reversion in the sense that the next game is always more likely to bring their cumulative winnings closer to the house edge rather than further from it. Not so with the stock market. The stuff about card counting is basically impossible to do these days but can alter the house edge, and also doesn't apply to the market.

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#202

Post by thehappypm »

Stocks are backstopped by the fact that companies are highly highly incentivized to keep the prices high. If suddenly the bubble pops and stocks fall 90%, every CEO suddenly has a very real fiduciary incentive to get the stock back up. Cut cost to yield dividends, buybacks, whatever it takes.

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#203

Post by whatshisface »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #124
lotsofpulp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could argue that the entire market is a mania. Objectively, the big publicly listed companies are growing and have stellar financials. I can think of no better place for someone to invest, other than maybe diversifying into real estate with high demand, if they already have a significant amount invested in public equity markets. Public equity market prices are also backed by the federal government, at least on…

I think a lot of newcomers to stock investing in the past year have been given the wrong ideas about the stock market. When all of the headlines are about GameStop and Nokia and AMC and some kid who made it lost a lot of money on RobinHood, the stock market can feel like a place for gambling. Now that cryptocurrency prices are listed right next to stock prices, many people don’t even understand that stocks are owners…

>why stocks can have any value without paying dividends.

Well, if a company was never going to issue dividends at any time in the future, or do dividend-alternatives like buybacks or a liquidation at the end of its life (not a normal option), or anything else, its shares would be worthless. I could actually imagine a tech company going out of business before its first dividend.

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#204

Post by thisisnico »

ryandrake wrote: post #187
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of newcomers to stock investing in the past year have been given the wrong ideas about the stock market. When all of the headlines are about GameStop and Nokia and AMC and some kid who made it lost a lot of money on RobinHood, the stock market can feel like a place for gambling. Now that cryptocurrency prices are listed right next to stock prices, many people don’t even understand that stocks are owners…

> Now that cryptocurrency prices are listed right next to stock prices, many people don’t even understand that stocks are ownership shares in real businesses instead of just another ticker symbol to gamble on. This distinction is practically useless, unless you own enough shares to have even tiny sway at shareholder meetings. Owning 1/1000000000th of a company doesn't mean any extra value or power to you. The big dif…

Edit: (Some) Stocks that don’t pay dividends still pay you. Most stocks now don’t pay dividends. Either they reinvest in the business (growing the stock’s value) or buyback shares with extra cash, (alternative method to dividends as they’re returning value to you the shareholder.)

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#205

Post by skystarman »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #177
JohnPrine wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a company isn't distributing dividends doesn't mean you're only buying a story. AMZN still has lots of room to grow. If I'm an investor in AMZN I would much rather them reinvest profits into a data center that will produce even more future profits than distribute the money to me. Once these growth companies top out in terms of their market share they'll pivot to distributing dividends, same as large esta…

Personally, I'm not smart enough to pick individual stocks. At some point (perhaps now) Amazon growth is predicated on cannibalizing other companies. After all, the broad market can't exceed the GDP generally for the long term. My primary point here is not to argue about investment concepts, merely to state a concern about the artificiality of it all. Financialization is real and rather spooky.

The thing is there's a FRACTION of a percentage of people who are "good at picking stocks".

Most PROFESSIONAL stock pickers don't beat the market. And those that do, a tiny fraction can do it consistently over a 5-10 year time frame.

This is backed up by decades of data. But we still have millions of people who apparently think they are smarter than the thousands of professional stock-pickers who have MAs, PhDs and years of experience and do it full-time and still don't beat the market.

And sure, many average joes were wildly successful with GME or whatever the latest meme stock is. Just as many people made a ton of money in the last tech bubble. Check back in 5-10 years...

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#206

Post by [deleted] »

RobertoG wrote: post #171
duxup wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like saying it won't be 'uncontrollable' isn't the same as calling that there won't be inflation and getting the reason right.

I think you feel that way because you can't appreciate the argument from only a small quote. They get it right. The reason QE was (is) not inflationary is because that money it's not being spent in the economy, it's only adding bank reserves. Bank reserves make the interest rate go lower, but, it will not go lower than zero, after that you can create all the reserves you want. Lower interest rates make credit more ch…

[deleted]

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#207

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

ahelwer wrote: post #14
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #11

The author falls for the "past equals future" fallacy. The only way to truly take the randomness out of the stock market is to have a multi-decade time horizon. He says so after looking at the data of a few decades. That makes no sense. It is like looking at 3 people and saying "People come in groups no larger than 3". The whole article is based on that premise. He has something like 90 data points and assumes the ne…

I mean yes, past performance doesn't guarantee future results. But it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively at it, when you have a phenomenon that's gone unchallenged for probably a hundred years now. It isn't guaranteed. But nobody's lost their shirt betting it'll continue yet . People always bring up Japan in these discussions, of course. The Nikkei 225 peaked on 29 December 1989, still only at half that value over…

The nikkei 225 peaked at 38k in 1989. It is 29k now, 76% of the old value.

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#208

Post by kqr »

hobs wrote: post #195
ryandrake wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now that cryptocurrency prices are listed right next to stock prices, many people don’t even understand that stocks are ownership shares in real businesses instead of just another ticker symbol to gamble on. This distinction is practically useless, unless you own enough shares to have even tiny sway at shareholder meetings. Owning 1/1000000000th of a company doesn't mean any extra value or power to you. The big dif…

There's a large difference, one of those is based on a pyramid scheme with no inherent value, and one is based on a company delivering value to customers. With the state of the stock market companies can and do go under, but generally those doing something for people dont magically disappear overnight (like any crypto certainly can.) That's it; that's the difference.

Sure, but this is already priced in. Most equity doesn't go completely down the toilet overnight, but it also doesn't give you spectacular overnight returns.

So it's still a game, only for lower stakes in both directions.

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#209

Post by robjan »

ahi wrote: post #169
JohnPrine wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a company isn't distributing dividends doesn't mean you're only buying a story. AMZN still has lots of room to grow. If I'm an investor in AMZN I would much rather them reinvest profits into a data center that will produce even more future profits than distribute the money to me. Once these growth companies top out in terms of their market share they'll pivot to distributing dividends, same as large esta…

CocaCola currently has a P/E of 32

You own the stock in perpetuity, not just for a year. As long as you don't expect the company to go bust any time soon that's not a bad PE ratio.

Re: Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average

#210

Post by kragen »

This article suffers from hindsight bias by virtue of focusing on the US stock market, for which this has been an exceptionally good century. If you were to include the markets of Britain, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, France, Poland, China, Argentina, and Switzerland, the picture doesn't look so rosy. Anything you invested in the Giełda Pieniężna w Warszawie in 01926, for example, would have evaporated in 01939; despite the "liberation" of Poland in 01945, no stock exchange would reopen there for 50 years.

Poland is an extreme case, but so is the US—I don't think any other country's stocks did so well during the 20th century. If someone were to write an article about how well Esso/ExxonMobil stock has done from 01926 to 02021 (11.9% I think), it would be easy to understand that this wasn't a recommendation to hold ExxonMobil for the next century, much less some other arbitrary stock; obviously the investors 95 years ago in the F.W. Woolworth Company and the Kennecott Mines Company didn't do quite as well, which is precisely why nobody would write an article today about buying and holding Woolworth's stock.

Will the US do so well over the next century? The spectacular bungling of the covid pandemic suggests that it may not.

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