“Many investors move from stock to stock or from mutual fund to mutual fund as if they were selecting and discarding cards in a game of gin rummy,” observed the Princeton economist Burton Malkiel.13 And they pay a price. Many studies have found that those who trade more frequently get worse returns than those who lean toward old-fashioned buy-and-hold strategies. Malkiel cited one study of sixty-six thousand American households over a five-year period in the 1990s when the market had a 17.9% annual return: households that traded the most had an annual return of only 11.4%.14 Massive time and
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