The Death Of Buy And Hold: We’re All Traders Now

The percentage of household assets invested in stocks fell from almost 40% in 1969 to a mere 13% in 1982, after thirteen years of grinding losses.

The conventional wisdom of financial advisors–to save money and invest it in stocks and bonds “for the long haul”–a “buy and hold” strategy that has functioned as the default setting of financial planning for the past 60 years–may well be disastrously wrong for the next decade.

This “buy and hold” strategy is based on a very large and unspoken assumption: that every asset bubble that pops will be replaced by an even bigger (and therefore more profitable) bubble if we just wait a few years.

The last time this conventional wisdom came into serious question was in the stagflationary 1970s, when stocks and bonds, when adjusted for inflation, lost over 40% of their value. The decade was punctuated by numerous rallies, but each one petered out.

The only way to profit in this sort of market is to trade, i.e. buy the lows and sells the highs. Buy and hold is a disastrously wrongheaded strategy when the underpinnings of the status quo are eroding.

The 36-year bull market in bonds is drawing to a close, as yields are rising even if official inflation is moribund. Buying and holding bonds will guarantee steadily increasing losses as existing bonds lose value as rates rise.

Stocks have risen solely on the back of central bank stimulus, which is now being reduced/ended. In my view, the political blowback of soaring income inequality due to central banks rewarding capital at the expense of labor will place limits on future central bank largesse.

These long-term reversals of trend make everyone a trader, whether they like it or not: buying and holding might work for real-world assets if inflation really gathers steam, but if markets gyrate in the winds of uncertainty, every asset might rise and fall or simply stagnate.

Being a trader simply means selling an asset when it has topped out relative to other asset classes, and shifting the proceeds into assets that have been crushed and are beginning an up-cycle. It sounds so absurdly simple: buy low, sell high. But it’s not that easy to accomplish in the real world.