When you write stuff like this...........

....................no one complains that you've named your blog, A Wealth of Common Sense:

Over the last 90 years or so the market have been in a bear market almost one-quarter of the time. Half the time you’re down 5% or worse. It’s difficult to appreciate this fact when looking at a long-term log scale stock chart that seems to only go up and to the right.

This is why stocks are constantly playing mind games with us. They generally go up but not every day, week, month or year.

No one can predict what the future returns will be in the market. No one knows what the future holds for economic growth. And we certainly can’t predict how investors will decide to price corporate cash flows at any given point in time out into the future.

But predicting future risk is fairly easy — markets will continue to fluctuate and experience losses on a regular basis. As an investor in stocks you will spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself because your portfolio has fallen in value from a previously seen higher level.

In a sense risk is easier to predict than returns.

Market losses are the one constant that don’t change over time — get used to it.