What is Buy & Hold?
Buying an asset and simply holding it through all ups and downs, never selling. The benchmark every strategy must beat.
Buy & hold means buying an asset and keeping it through all ups and downs, without trying to time the market. For broad stock indices it has been a successful, low-cost strategy over the very long run.
Its weakness is the path: buy & hold fully experiences every crash, and in some markets — Japan after 1989, the Nasdaq after 2000, many commodities — investors waited decades to break even.
Buy & hold is the natural benchmark for any active strategy: a strategy only adds value if it improves on simply holding, after costs and with less pain.
Related terms
See Buy & Hold applied to real markets — 30 markets, decades of data — in the Research Terminal.
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