The sound financial advice hidden in plain sight in an “Onion” article

The Onion may have been playing it up for laughs when they wrote the article titled Billionaire Reading Name In Panama Papers Totally Forgot He Even Had Funds In Seychelles, but like some of their best articles, there’s a surprisingly big nugget of truth in it.

Fidelity Investments did a study of their customers’ investment accounts that performed the best, and one key factor they had in common was that their owners had forgotten about them. Or at the very least, the customers acted as if they’d forgotten about them and simply left them alone.

A lot of this stems from the fact that by and large, we’re terrible at investing. The chart below shows the performance of the “average investor” was below most markets. Even cash — in the form of 3-month T-bills) did better:

It may seem weird to get real-world-applicable truth from a comedy site, but remember that these days…