The simplest and most effective strategy in stock market investing has always been buy and hold. Buy a good stock at a good price and hold it for many years. Even ‘boring’ stocks could make you a lot of money using a strategy like that. But in the last few years I have read several articles and heard from other investment professionals that buy and hold is dead. Instead they recommend trading stocks. Buy, hold for a short while, then sell them. Otherwise they say, you’ll never make any real money.
Are they right? Should trading replace a buy and hold strategy? Well I won’t keep you in suspense. The answer is a big no. The problem with people who don’t believe in buy and hold, is that they don’t really understand the concept. With a buy and hold strategy you first pick a stock that is reasonably priced. Then you hold it for possibly many, many years until it is unreasonably priced. Then you sell it. That period could be 3 years or 10 years, or 30 years. Buy and hold never meant buy at any price and hold it forever. It means buy cheap and sell when the price gets silly.
But buy and hold doesn’t work when you start with a stock that is unreasonably priced. Something that is outrageously expensive could take you years, even decades to make a profit. And here is where the ‘traders’ make their mistake. They look at the big cap/internet bubble of 2000 and use that as evidence of the death of buy and hold. But even in 2000, if you’d bought reasonably priced stocks you’d have made a handsome profit the last 6 years. It was those unreasonably priced ones that did not work with buy and hold. And that hasn’t changed in the last few years.
Buy cheap and wait. The most boring and successful investment strategy then and now.