OK, so the idea of buying individual stocks is about as out of fashion these days as shoulder pads and big hair.
Let’s say you’ve also realized that while the S&P 500 index SPX, +1.35% has tripled your money this millennium, when you count dividends, a long list of perfectly ordinary well known, well run, household-name blue-chip stocks have beaten it into a cocked hat. You didn’t have to be a Wall Street insider to buy and hold stocks like Microsoft MSFT, +0.17%, Procter & Gamble PG, +0.40%, PepsiCo PEP, +0.36%, Starbucks SBUX, +1.95%, Johnson & Johnson JNJ, -0.27%, Lockheed Martin LMT, +2.
But it’s also because, frankly, after 70 our financial awareness and skill starts going into decline.So, at least report finance professors Michael Finke and Sandra Huston of the American College of Financial Services and Texas Tech University respectively. Older investors pick worse stocks and are worse at market “timing,” they find. Research into individual brokerage accounts, they report, find that older investors are even more likely to jump on the market bandwagon than everyone else after it’s risen a long way, and more likely to bail when it tanks.
Excuse me, your advise is not sound. It really depends on the investor and how much reading on the subject she/he engages in. A person wishing to keep an active mind can invest well into their 80s. People in their 70s are a great repository of wisdom.
Prob when you become an old whippersnapper
70. The answer is 70.
Don’t breath the gas!