Even a Lazy Stock Investor Can Make 7.96% a Year…

There’s so much superstition surrounding stocks.

So much in fact that it’s a wonder the world’s stock markets have lasted so long.

It was only three months ago that some people told you to ‘sell in May and go away’.

So much for that advice.

Stocks are up 1% since then. Sure, it’s hardly a knock-your-socks-off gain, but is it a reason to have sold all your stocks? No.

But no sooner have investors recovered from the ‘panic’ of selling in May, they now hear that buying stocks from August to October is at least as bad, if not worse.

What should you do? If everyone says it’s a bad time to buy stocks, it must be, right?

Except, as we’ve long told you: be careful about following conventional wisdom. The advice may be conventional, but it’s rarely wise. Here, let’s show you what we mean…

The stock market has a lot of ups and downs.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

Sometimes stocks go up. And sometimes they go down.

That’s just a fact of life. But despite these ups and downs, over the long run, stocks have proven to be a great way of building wealth.

So even if you invest at the worst possible time, guess what? You can still make a pretty darn good return from stocks.

September isn’t so terrible

Aside from May, the conventional wisdom says September and October are bad times to invest.

Well, as we say, we don’t think much of conventional wisdom.

We tend to think that conventional wisdom is really just an excuse for laziness. Rather than doing the research, investors will say, ‘It’s true…a bloke told me!’

That may be good enough for some folks. But it’s not good enough for us.

So we crunched a few numbers.

We’ll admit to our own bit of laziness. The numbers we crunched were for the All Ordinaries index. It was easier to do that than do the same number crunching on individual stocks.

But there’s also a reason for using an index. By virtue of what it is, an index will only ever give you an average return of a select number of stocks.

That’s OK. The point with this exercise is to show that even an investor who puts in no effort to their investing can still make a good return from stocks.

Read the rest of this article at Money Morning