You’ve been trading for three years, made a few hundred trades, spent thousands of hours watching charts, picking stocks, researching, and worrying. Has your overall return exceeded 60%? You haven’t even calculated it. Because you have a vague sense that the answer doesn’t look good.
You know the profit and loss of each individual stock. How much did Nvidia make, how much did SpaceX lose, how many trading swings did Micron run back and forth. The winning trades—you remember them clearly, and screenshots might still be saved. What about the losing trades? You’ve conveniently forgotten selectively.
But the general ledger can’t fool anyone.
You remember those few trades that made a 30% profit—the smug little masterpieces. You don’t remember the ones that took a 10% cut, the long three-month sideways period that chewed up your time cost, the fees that piled up one by one, and the chasing highs that left you trapped before you quietly pretended not to see it.
When you add it all up, your true annualized return might be in single digits.
It might even be negative.
What did you do over these three years? Spend one or two hours a day scrolling through analysis posts—check it before the open and after the close. In earnings season you’re so tense you can’t sleep. You tweak your positions and switch stocks every few days, thinking you’re smarter than the market.
How much is your time cost worth as an hourly wage? Have you calculated it?
Let’s assume you spent 2,000 hours over three years in U.S. stocks. If your total return matches SPY’s 60%, and with $500,000 in principal you make $300,000, your hourly wage is 150 yuan. You’d be better off delivering food.
What if your total return is lower than SPY? Then your hourly wage for those 2,000 hours is negative. You spent 2,000 hours making your returns worse.
Go home today and do one thing.
Open your brokerage account, find the date and amount of your first deposit, glance at your current total assets, and do a division.
That number is the real result of all your “effort” over these three years. Not the handful of pretty trades you remember. Not that time you bragged to your friends about catching a bottom. It’s the cold, hard ledger.
After you calculate, you’ll face a very brutal question: over these three years, did the time, effort, sleep, and anxiety you spent actually produce returns that beat even the most boring index fund?
If the answer is no, you need to seriously think about one thing—are you actually investing, or are you using the experience of losing money to manufacture the thrill of “participating in the market” for yourself?
SPY doesn’t need you to research, watch the screen, or get anxious. It only needs you to buy it—and then not touch it.
60% over three years. Did you beat it?
