Personal Finance and Investing

superior long-time record over bonds and other fixed income investments.

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html

As for me -- in my early investing years in the mid-1980s thru the 1990s, I was mostly in bonds and CDs (which were in the double digit yields in the beginning of the period and in high single digit yields in most of the 1990s). Fortunately, I did have about 25% in equities and that did considerably better than the fixed income stuff.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I used to squawk and holler about national and world events and oh God, the market is going to crash and its rigged and blah blah blah. And whenever the market dipped, I was a "see I told you so" type of idiot. And whenever it went up, I was a "it's a bubble" type of idiot. Meanwhile I noticed that my parents were nonchalant about market dips and just plugged away with a wide range of equity investments (mostly). They've seen a lot worse than we have, having experienced the Great Depression and World War II (in which they both served).

I was also fortunate enough to be a member of AAII (the American Association of Individual Investors), and eventually began to read more and more articles from the AAII Journal, and that was my primary way that I learned to invest, and to spend less time gnashing my teeth and wringing my hands. Consequently, I fortunately held on to my equities through both the dot com crash and the housing bubble crashes (I did switch between equities during the housing bubble crash, but I kept it in equities).