-1.7%
That’s how much DIY investors UNDERperformed over the last 10 years, according to Morningstar.
Morningstar measured the returns of the actual investors vs. the funds that they owned.
In their own words:
“This shortfall, or gap, stems from poorly timed purchases and sales of fund shares, which cost investors roughly one-fifth the return they would have earned if they had simply bought and held.”
In other words, DIY investors trying to predict the future and then getting in and getting out and getting in cost them 20% of what they could have gotten if they had just sat still.
#alwaysbeinvested
In other interesting takeaways from their annual study:
– The more volatile a fund, the more trouble investors tended to have capturing its full return. Funds with higher levels of volatility generally experienced wider return gaps.
– Although dollar-cost averaging, which involves investing the same dollar amount on a regular schedule, can help instill discipline, we didn’t find evidence that it would have yielded significantly better dollar-weighted returns.
– Bad decisions such as trading too often, buying funds after they’ve already run up, and selling in a panic after market declines can all chip away at investor returns.
