Getting Short

The gears in the system are too often turned by short-term profiteers and people who seek to manipulate us for their own ends. They need to own the responsibility for their selfishness and not blame us for it.
Seth Godin "Getting What We Asked For"

Not all "short-term profiteers" are selfish. Some of them are simply older. It's something of conventional wisdom that if someone has invested properly over the years that no gyrations in the market will touch them. That no matter what happens, there will always be time to undo whatever damage has been done. But time marches on; it's not always the first quarter. Sure, the advice is to lower one's exposure to risk as one gets older, but unless someone is managing their portfolio themselves, they're left with needing to follow the advice of someone who has their own agenda. It's unrealistic to presume that everyone has managed their money (or had someone else manage it) in such a way that they don't find themselves needing to raise a significant amount of money quickly. Or to presume that they are at fault for that situation coming to pass.

I once invested for a vacation. I didn't need spectacular returns; I was simply looking for a slightly better return than I could get from a bog-standard savings account. I told the investment company that I was interested in very low risk. When the bottom fell out of my portfolio during the 2008 financial crisis, I found out that their definition of very low risk was quite different from mine. (Actually what happened was that the counselor I'd drawn when I set up the account had decided that I'd be better off in a higher-risk strategy that had underperformed in the good times, and then tanked.) In the end, I would have been better off if I kept the money under my mattress in cash.

Had I wanted to make up my losses in any reasonable timeframe, I would have been interested in short-term profits; something that I could have invested in, and then dumped once it had risen to a certain point. And I think that there are more people in this category than are sometimes allowed for. Not that there aren't people willing to allow the markets to do damage to others in order to advance their own investments. But sometimes, the people who have been damaged are also looking for big returns.