I am prone to saying that markets are very generous if you allow them to be – the unfortunate thing is that most traders/investors regard the markets as hostile. This perception of hostility generates a raft of negative emotional responses to every slight perturbation the market might make. This in turn hampers their capacity to think expansively about what the market actually offers.
As an example consider the fact that domestically our market often offers generous dividend reinvestment programs, which are often overlooked by longer-term investors who would rather take the cash or who through poor financial planning are forced to take the cash. The example below is of TLS which I have chosen because of its less than stellar performance – I was going to posit the question as to how you can screw a near monopoly up this badly but then anyone who has had experience with TLS would know exactly how they screw it up. The chart below shows the value of $1 invested in TLS both adjusted for dividends and without dividends.
If you are a buy and hold style of investor (good luck with that as an idea) the DRP would have saved you from complete disaster. However, there will be many who take this as an invocation to simply buy and hold and that is not the intention of the lesson. The intention is to show you how you can use the market to increase returns, For example, my long term trend following system last generated a buy signal on TLS on 6/11/11 and exited on 16/8/15. Plotting the data for this period generates the following.
Fairly obvious really.
