Vladislav Stepanov/iStock via Getty Images Introduction Are you beating the market? If you're not, I can assure you that you're not the only one. Financial firms of all stripes are marketing their creative trades to clients beset with uncertainty about the economy and Federal Reserve policy. Yet virtually no allocation has proved as lucrative as the simplest of them all: Buying and holding the S&P 500 .
- Bloomberg (emphasis added) Generally speaking, I do not care about beating the market every single year. I'm not saying that as an excuse for potentially bad years that may lay ahead, but because I believe a solid long-term strategy should be focused on beating the market on a longer-term basis - not necessarily every single year. While I know that some of my readers have track records of beating the market almost every single year, I know that many who try to do the same often sacrifice their long-term strategy to find the best short-term investments to beat the market.
Sometimes, that can be very dangerous and lead to unnecessary losses and portfolio constructions that have a hard time beating the market on a longer-term basis. Right now, we are in a very challenging market environment that makes it hard to beat the market. Going back to the Bloomberg article I just quoted, their research found that 75% of equity ETFs have underperformed the S&P 500 so far this year, making it one of the worst years since at least 2010 (when data collection began).
Bloomberg Hence, I whole.
