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Viliam_Bur comments on Brainstorming for post topics - Less Wrong Discussion

21 Post author: NancyLebovitz 31 May 2014 03:08PM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 June 2014 10:40:24PM *  9 points [-]

I would like to read it, as long as there will be more than just the basic idea of "you can't be reliably better than the market, and the index funds copy the market".

For example, there are many index funds. I know they are supposed to be better than all other options, but how do I compare them against each other? Or, how much of the historical success of index funds is a survivor bias, that USA was simply not destroyed in a war, while many other countries were? (If you had invested your money in 1900 in Russian or German index funds, how much would you have today? Let's suppose you would put 1/3 in Russian, 1/3 in German, 1/3 in American index funds, how much would you have today? Is the advice for your readers to pick a random country, to always pick USA because that worked in the past, or to diversify internationally?)