Re: NIFTY 50 future TRENDS
One of my maternal uncle married a Keralite lady. Recently I met aunt's father who shifted to Delhi after retirement and hardly speaks hindi. Now he is 62 and still keeps buying shares. He never looks at price, economy, inflation and he just buys few selective stocks. I asked about how much profit he might be having, old man replied "I don't know"! I asked my aunt and was shocked to know he might be having crores worth shares which he was buying from age of 30! A man who don't use any TA or FA is sitting on hundred times returns and we get happy on few reversals and spikes.
It is a joke, so don't take it the wrong way. So he has crores at 62, if he had done some market timing, he would be Jhunjhunwala !!
The point is you can do equivalent to SIPs and make a lot of money. However, with some adjustments here and there ... and these need not be daily, you can make a whole lot more. I calculated that if he had just invested 10000 rupees 32 years back when he started (yes I know 10000 was a big amount of money then, but I am talking about just 1 time investment, not monthly), at the rate of 20% growth, he would have 341821 by now. And assuming he invested that much every year (incrementing for inflation and/or higher salary and income), it easily adds up to more than 1 CR.
Without going into numbers, I had some amount of equity during the dot com days. I am a passive investor so I just let it sit. I also did not act during the 2008 crash. As a result, my equity in 2011 is almost the same as what it was in 2001. Yes, I did not invest more, and if I had invested in SIPs, it could be a different number. However, the point is that whether you take corrective / rebalancing / asset allocation steps on a daily level (which is trading) or monthly or yearly levels, you can make an order of magnitude difference in the returns. And this is where FAs and TAs help.
I started actively learning (if you call 1-2 hours a day active learning) only this January after the market crash. As usual, I was blindsided as everyone was talking about Nifty going higher and higher. However, having done some learning (still nowhere near an expert), when I look at the ichimoku charts of Nifty at a monthly level, the price is so far from the cloud and the tenken/kijun pair, that I realize it was so obvious. Of course such extremes do not come every year, but .... the picture is there for anyone who cares to spend the time.
Long story short, I agree that slow and steady investments over a lifetime can give you way more than a nest egg. However, using some FA/TA on them can give the same nest egg to your kids and grandkids ;-)
[EDIT/ADD] I realize there is a lot of repetition. Apologize for that, but I will let the original comment stand and not revise it.