Here it is – yet another financial advisor blog shaking its finger at you about not timing the market. Sorry folks, as long as people keep buying high and selling low, you are going to get this message from my BFFs (Best Financial Friends) and me.
And for those of you who believe Crypto is your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I say, maybe. But it depends on you not making the same mistakes you may have made when you were investing in the S&P 500 Index.
This article from Morningstar details how GREAT an investor in the iShares Bitcoin ETF would have done if they had dumped all their allocated crypto investment (no more than 5% of your liquid assets, for the love of all that’s holy, please!) on January 5, 2024. 46% gain per year through November 26, 2025! Wow!
But what did people actually do? Put a little in, wait, it’s up! Put some more in, wait, it’s up more! So the average investor saw returns more like 11%/year.
Now, there are several reasons for this, not all investor-behavior related. Read more deeply into the article for nuanced reasons on the gap between investor results and posted fund returns.
My point, and I do have one, is to be wary of straight investment return numbers as they are (legally) published by the investment industry.
Just because a fund posts a certain performance – and BTW, a two-year time horizon is microscopically small in terms of decision making – it doesn’t mean the average investor (you and me) did anything close to that well.
