Originally posted on Money with Merne’s Facebook Page on May 17, 2017:
I read an article that listed several companies and compared their stock price ten years ago versus today. It gave me physical pain to read because I owned at least half of the companies it mentioned for a time during 2008-2009 after the stock market crash. I was just getting my feet wet with buying individual stocks outside of a retirement fund and I was buying and selling quickly, whenever I made a 10-20% profit. You’d think that would be good (10-20x the interest you get from an online savings account) but I could’ve made 10x my money if I would’ve just bought and held all this time! I can see it in the stocks I DID hold onto, a few have doubled, tripled and quadrupled in value. Investing is not rocket science. Find a good company, buy it, and hang onto it as long as it’s still a good company. No need to spend hours a day watching the market ebb and flow. The best profits come over time! That’s why the sooner you start, the more money you’ll make. While I made mistakes back then selling too quickly, it was one of the greatest lessons I could’ve learned.