Jon Quast

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.

As Matt pointed out, that's not always practical, but let's assume you did.

You had $5,000 to invest for the year and you could invest it all in a single day.

And you picked the very best day of that year.

The day that the market was at its lowest point for the entire year.

Somehow you had a crystal ball.

You predicted that.

And let's just say that there's another person out there who is the worst possible trader possible.

They picked the top of the market for a single day of that year and invested all their money on that one.

Well, if you were the best, you wound up with $5.6 million.