Missing the 10 Best Days

by Richard Ahrens

One of the standard arguments against attempting to time the market says that if you missed the ten best days in the last 20 years, the long-term value of your portfolio would be significantly less than if you had just stayed invested. Using price data from the S&P 500 index, I decided to find out if this argument is really true. And rather than limiting the search to just the 10 biggest one-day gains in the last 10 or 20 years, I tracked down the 20 biggest gains in the last 50 years.

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