(Extracted from When You Were Born > Everything Else by Michael Batnick)
What is the most important factor behind one’s investing experience? Is it their ability to analyze a business, their temperament, or their network? It’s none of these things. For almost all investors, the most important driver of investment returns is the year you were born, and therefore how old you are when you began investing.
…if you had invested from 1960-1980 and beaten the market by 5% each year, you would have made less money than if you had invested from 1980-2000 and underperformed the market by 5% a year.