Imagine 10 years ago you put $10,000 into an account, invested it in some stocks, made some trades, and now 10 years later you have your original $10,000 plus another $10,000 you made from investing. We maintain a firewall between our advertisers and our editorial team. If you take action based on one of our recommendations, we get a small share of the revenue from our commerce partners. And Saudi Arabia and Russia apparently reached a truce to reduce oil output, causing a rally in oil prices, which is good news for oil companies that have been hammered by plunging prices of crude. Yes, there have absolutely been nasty crashes, pullbacks, and periods of bad performance. It takes commitment, patience, smart decisions, and steady work to make your money grow over time. All Rights Reserved. And the stock market isn’t right for everyone. In that sense, the financial markets are pre-emptively adjusting to a possible world in which trillions of dollars from the Treasury and the Fed do the trick and prevent the virus from doing lasting damage. But just because there are reasons for the stock market rally doesn’t mean those reasons are good ones. The markets started going up on March 9, 2009 and broke a record of 3,453 days of gains in September 2018. Our experts have been helping you master your money for over four decades. If the money you want to grow is earmarked for a down payment on a home, for example, you may not have time to ride out stock market fluctuations before you want to buy. You’ll log into your account one day and see how much you’ve made and get a proud, giddy feeling. For example, here’s the S&P 500 (which is a group of 500 large companies) from January, 1928 — July, 2019. Research suggests this could return nearly the same as stocks over the long term, once you consider both the slowly appreciating value of the property AND the value of the rent you collect. But current market pricing suggests that investors are counting on a speedy rebound. If you look at the S&P 500 index over nearly any long period of time, it provides around 10% annual returns. For example, let’s pretend you buy a portfolio of 20 dividend stocks that overall (as a group) pay a dividend of 4% of your total investment. Congress also still was not in an agreement about how much more stimulus is needed, and some do not even want more stimulus. In 2007, she was part of a team that won the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for the coverage of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee's cut to short-term interest rates in September 2007 and the impact it had on consumers. In other words, what if you could double your money in 10 years? The sellers will keep raising the price as long as buyers keep buying… But even that’s not a great deal, because in the stock market you could earn so much more. If you do, you could be costing yourself big when your golden years come around. If you have no idea where to start, consider a target date fund where a professional investment manager chooses a combination of low-cost index funds based on your target retirement age. window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; What’s great about stocks is that they’re relatively easy to invest in. Maybe you’ve got some money in your company’s retirement plan, or saved in a bank account, or invested in CDs, or something else. Our editorial team receives no direct compensation from advertisers, and our content is thoroughly fact-checked to ensure accuracy.