Jason Zweig

Yep.

Uncle Sam is your partner, and he's always got his hand in your pocket.

If you buy and hold, you can defer most of those taxes, and often all of them, until you eventually sell.

And the final friction is your own behavior.

Most people are very prone to performance chasing.

When something goes up, instead of thinking to ourselves, oh, it's become more expensive.

If it was a pair of socks, I wouldn't want to buy it now.

But it's not socks, it's stocks.

And they're going up, so I'm going to buy them anyway.

And then when they go down, instead of telling ourselves, oh, they've just gotten cheaper, they're on sale, people say, I don't want it anymore because it went down.

So when you buy and hold, particularly if you buy and hold one or a few index funds, you short circuit all of those problems and you eliminate that friction.

Well, I think like a lot of people, I had all kinds of concerns.

I guess I was a little...

skeptical that we would have a really positive return because both 2023 and 24 had been very robust years.

And often the stock market goes up three years in a row and it can go up more years in a row than that.

But

Those were two very good returns.

And so I was like, maybe we'll get like a slightly positive year.

And of course, it turned out the S&P 500 was up like 17.9%.

Yeah, a blockbuster.