You’ve probably heard that investing money in the stock market is the best way to grow your wealth over the long-term. But that’s only true if you avoid mistakes—and unfortunately, many of your natural tendencies can seriously handicap your ability to get rich on the stock market. For instance, we’re set up to listen to the news, follow the crowd, and run for safety when danger is afoot—but those tendencies can turn the stock market into a losing proposition. Here are some of the little investment mistakes you need to learn to sidestep if you want to make money from your investments.
1. Trading Too Much
The more you buy and sell your investments, the greater your chance of losing money. If you invested $10,000 in the S&P 500 in 1995 and stayed invested through 2014, you would’ve earned 9.85 percent annually or $59,593. Yet, if you missed the best ten days during that 19-year period your return would have fallen to 6.1 percent. Nineteen years later, your initial $10,000 would be worth $30,803.
Timing the market is a losing proposition, and even the best rarely win.
2. Ignoring Fees
Before turning over one dollar to a financial advisor or investment fund, understand the fees. Yes, every fund has an investment management fee, which ranges from 0.03 percent to over 1.0 percent.
The SEC.gov website explains the impact of higher fees on your investments, but here’s an example: Assume that you’re a conservative investor and invest your $100,000 inheritance for 20 years in funds that returns an average of 4 percent annually. At the end of the 20 years, the investment that charged a 1.0 percent fee would be worth $180,000. The investment that charged 0.25 percent would be worth $210,000. That’s a $30,000 difference between the high and low fee funds.
Don’t make the mistake of paying high fees. You can get wide diversification from Schwab’s S&P 500 Index Fund (SWPPX) for a rock-bottom 0.03 percent annual management fee.
3. Not Investing Enough in Your 401(k) to Snare the Employer Match
If your employer matches a percent of your contribution into your 401(k) or 403(b), then you’re throwing away free money if you don’t contribute. Many employers match your own retirement plan contribution dollar-for-dollar up to 5 percent. If you’re earning $70,000 per year, not investing $3,500 in your own retirement account is not only depriving yourself of the chance to build up a robust retirement account but you’re telling your employer, “I don’t need your $3,500, why don’t you keep it!”
4. Putting Investments in the Wrong Accounts
Taxes play into most financial decisions, and it’ll cost you to place your financial assets in the wrong accounts.
Once you’ve maxed out your 401(k) match, it pays to be smart about which investments go where, as different investments get taxed differently. If you’re looking for investments to put in a taxable account, you should look to stocks, low-turnover stock mutual funds, and municipal bonds that you expect to hold for the long term. That’s because your stock gains are taxed at the capital gains rates, generally lower than the ordinary income tax rates. In most cases, you’re best off placing bonds, taxed as ordinary income, in tax-advantaged retirement accounts.
5. Trying to Beat the Market
Don’t try to beat the market, because chances are that you won’t. Chasing glamorous momentum investment strategies aren’t likely to pay off. In 2015, 66 percent of active money managers failed to beat the market returns. If you like those odds, consider that between 2005 and 2015, 82 percent of active fund managers failed to beat the returns of the S&P 500 market index.
Great investors such as Warren Buffett and John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, champion the idea of investing in low-fee, market matching index funds. And the historical stock market data appears to back up their recommendation to invest for the long haul in index funds.
That's why they advise that investors don’t try to beat the market, because chances are that most investors won’t. However, such individuals are in the business of managing long-haul funds, so their recommendation is not entirely altruistic. Consider that in any given year, 60 to 80 percent of all fund managers failed to beat the returns of the S&P 500 market index, so fund managers have the same difficulty that individual investors do as well. It is tough to beat benchmark average returns.
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