Why Are You Still Losing Money on ETFs? 4 Fatal Mistakes That Make 20 Years Pointless
You are buying the S&P500 and the Nasdaq 100, but your account stays in the red. The problem is not the ETFs — it is the four operational mistakes Taiwanese investors make most often: turning dollar-cost averaging into a market-timing tool, ignoring the cost structure, ignoring currency, and panic-stopping contributions at the worst moment. Perfect execution over 20 years builds roughly NT$3.5 million; after mistakes it is only about NT$2.7 million — how exactly does a million NTD walk out of your pocket? This article walks through the arithmetic, exposes the fee and currency traps, and gives you four pre-written emotional rules that protect your compounding when discipline breaks down. If you are about to give up on ETFs, read this first — the answer is rarely to stop, and almost always to fix how you buy.