Investors know that time in the market is their friend. Stay in the market for a long period of time, and good things will happen, even in times of high volatility.

A supporting statistic is often presented: if you miss the best days, your overall return will be dramatically lower. For instance, between 01/03/2006 to 12/30/2016, a buy-and-hold strategy in the S&P500 would have turned a $100 investment into $206. If you missed the best 0.5% of days (in this case, the best 14 days), the $100 investment would have lost money, and become $86. See chart below:

MissBest14.png

But what would happen if we were to miss the worst 0.5% of days? The $100 investment would turn into a whopping $523. The chart below illustrates this point:

 MissWorst14.png

The S&P500 is hardly an anomaly. We see the same pattern with different investments.

For example:

$100 investment in:

Buy-and-hold

Miss Best Days

Miss Worse Days

SPY

$206

$86

$523

AGG

$148

$116

$191

GIS

$279

$144

$557

AAPL

$1,298

$370

$4,799

 

Conclusions:

  • The impact of the worst and best 0.5% of trading days (a.k.a. “the tails”) have a very significant impact on success or failure of an investment
  • Avoiding the worst days is in many cases dramatically more impactful than catching the best days
  • If the cost of hedging the worst 0.5% days of the S&P500 costed an average of 500bps per year, would it be worth it?

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