Quote from: HiRollStaff on May 03, 2018, 05:29:14 AM

Quote from: jaysabi on April 30, 2018, 04:10:35 PM

Jim Rodgers has been bearish on the stock market since the 1980s and how well has that prediction worked out? The stock market has been a tremendous engine for wealth accumulation over that time. People who constantly predict economic collapse are tiresome, and it's very much a case of the boy who cried wolf. Jim Rodgers isn't the worst of them, but because there are so many of them, his predictions can mostly be lumped in with them. The bearish sentiment on the stock market has to be viewed as a black mark, even though his own fund handily outperformed. Outperforming something doesn't make the other thing a bad investment. The stock market has been an excellent investment since the 1980s.

This is an interesting point. About constantly predicting economic crash. Not many of those investors are on the top ten list. What I have found is that the top ten list is full of people who are either A) Critical yet optimistic, and B) sometimes very quiet about their successes. Not often you hear someone like Warren Buffett bad mouthing a bunch of companies or stocks.

That's because the stock market has been the largest driver of wealth creation in the modern American economy. You don't win betting against the stock market or the American economy for long periods of time. Rodgers seems to be a permabear, and while he has made a lot of money correctly betting against certain things at different points in time, he's been constantly bearish on the economy for the last 40 years, and if you were out of the market for that period of time because you were bearish on it, you would have missed an extraordinary wealth gain. $1000 invested in the S&P index in 1980 would be worth $24,000 today ($66,000 if you were reinvesting dividends the whole time). 24x (or 66x) your investment over a time period where someone has constantly been saying a crash is around the corner makes my point. Crashes happen, and sometimes Rodgers gets it right, but if you ignore that and stay invested for long periods of time, you get wealthier by investing in the American economy.