So, would you trust your money with NWBGX (never open to outside investors), or VWINX? While no MF performance is ever guaranteed, you would be sure that the ride is never boring with NWBGX. You may have sleepless nights, and would be advised to wear your Depend to bed. The manager himself however is used to it and only has bad dreams occasionally.
I am a bit surprised that other than the comments about testosterone, nobody else said "Good grief! Are you a masochist?".
It was not true! Not entirely, at least.
I was only losing sleep in early 2000, when I was "making money", lots of it. Let me explain further.
I rolled out my 401k from megacorp to an IRA in 1998, and had the job of reinvesting it. Tech stocks were hot, so I started to buy some tech sector MFs and individual companies. Being an EE, I was enamored with all that wonderful superfast chips, network routers, etc... Still, I was not 100% into these stocks, in fact I was only about 70% in equities total, and perhaps only 30% of portfolio in tech stocks.
Yet, in just about 6 months ending on March 24, 2000, I was gaining maybe 30%.
In early March, some of my stocks were jumping 20% a day! And they kept going day after day! This couldn't be right, so one such crazy day I grabbed 4 of the hottest of the bunch and sold them. My cost basis was about $80K, and I made $40K gain in a matter of a couple of months. But then, you know what happened? A few days later, I checked, and found out I could have had another $40K if I waited a bit.
I didn't know what to do! I lost sleep. Of course, in hindsight, I should just keep on selling until I was out of these stocks! Note that none of these were dot-com stocks. They were all real companies, but their P/E were in the stratosphere. No matter, people said. Their growth justified that! Right! That was the time when Sir Templeton made $80M for himself by shorting some of the dot-coms. In a later interview, he said that he was just "helping people". They clamored to buy, so he sold to them, even if he did not own these stocks.
I eventually sold my tech stocks, when they all started to come down, and I could not stand the pain. But then, when they were down to 1/3, or even 1/5 of their highs, I thought they were cheap now, and bought back. Big mistake! Many of them eventually went under, or got bought out for peanuts.
Many people lost all in that fantastic bubble. So, if you look at my original post, when I said that I only lost 30% from Jan 2000 to Jan 2003, I thought I was saving my ass fairly well. And that tech bust period was when I had no income!
I guess I had to personally experience such a bubble to appreciate what I had read about all previous bubbles in history. Once I understood it (and survived one), I regained my calm and have been OK since. In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, I don't think I was as scared as people who were not immunized with the tech bust. Also, misery loves company. Everybody was hurting. And I was still having the ability to generate income via w*rk.
Here's to jog your memory. In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the S&P500 dropped 55% from Oct 2007 to March 2009. Balanced funds like Dodge&Cox (DODBX) and Wellesley (VWINX) lost 50% and 22% respectively. Oh, I am sure we all remember that. It was all reflected in the archived threads here. I did not do as well as Wellesley, but much better than S&P and DODBX.
And talk about DODBX, I bought it in 2002, then more in 2004. Never sold it, and at this point, it rebounded and still gives me a combined gain of 45%. Not great, but could have been much worse.
But I need to learn how to get that specific info out of it.
