“Scary” Stocks Go Up Most of The Time
Even a quick perusal of a few investing references or media articles will leave you with the clear impression that stocks are “scary” and bonds are “safe”. That seems to be the conventional wisdom.
But the conventional wisdom is predicated on the misleading idea that routine volatility equals risk. And because stocks have higher routine volatility than bonds, stocks must be scary. However, it turns out that routine volatility tells us remarkably little about our likely long-term outcomes when investing in these two assets.
For example, in my early February post, I wrote about the chances of losing inflation-adjusted money over various time periods, when invested in stocks (as represented by the S&P 500) versus bonds (as represented by the U.S. 10-Year Treasury Bond). These two graphs tell the tale using Aswath Damodaran data going back to 1928.