Vinnie,
Take a look at the screen shot below. Trading the ETFs that track the property and casualty insurance industry would have done better than owning AFG directly or its bonds, which is often the case with trying to pick individual stocks rather than just making a broad bet on the whole industry. Yeah, for sure. Sometimes one can pick an index-beating winner. But just as often, one picks one that under-performs the average.
Also, for sure. Trying to pick individual stocks is a fun game. (E.g., I’m up hundreds of percentage points on some of my mining stocks.) But picking individual stocks responsibly is time-consuming, green eye shade work that is nearly always better spent just pulling up a price-volume chart for an ETF that tracks the industry and making a 3-second, buy/sell decision on that basis alone. (IMHO, natch.)
If a chart isn’t drop- dead obvious in a single glance, don’t try to torture it into to confirming the prejudice to buy that you brought to it. Also, forget about trying to trade “the ripples.” The broad, fundamentally-supported moves –described in Dow Theory as “waves” and “tides”– are what you want to be owing, either as an ‘investor’, or as a ‘trader’, not that there is any material difference between the two. Both are just making bets about the outcome of some future event and hoping they get it right.
But what I’d suggest is this. If you want to own that AFGC bond for its income payouts, then do so, as well as buy others. But don’t bet the farm on any of them and realize, as I keep saying, that inflation is going to convert into mere pennies the dollars put into long-dated bonds.
