Jon Quast

It reduces a fraction of a fraction, not a fraction of a whole.

The memory imbalance will likely continue, in my opinion.

Yeah, I want to build on this, Matt.

You talked about taking emotions out of it.

You know, people, we have feelings.

We're emotional beings.

We're not going to change that entirely.

I think that's okay.

But personally, when it comes to my financial decisions, I don't want to be making that based on my feelings because my feelings aren't reliable.

They do change.

I'd rather be making my financial decisions based on the facts.

because the facts don't change.

And so I want to bring a factual study into this conversation.

So Fidelity analyzed some returns, a hypothetical 5,000 annual investment from 1980 to 2023.

So basically $200,000 invested over 42, 43 years.

If you invested all of that money on January 1st of each of those years, you wound up with 5.1 million.

If you invested $417 a month, which is $5,000 a year but broken out monthly, at the start of each month, you had slightly less, $4.8 million.

I think that this supports a belief that the earlier you get the money in the market working for you, the better.

So let's pretend that you were the best trader out there.

Somehow you had the $5,000 all up front.