If you didn’t buy the dip in March, you never will.
To use my Ford Fiesta analogy, if you come to me and say “this Ford Fiesta is only 60k! That’s 40 percent off! I would say you’re using a sleazy sales tactic on me, because it’s not worth 60k either. Comparing it with some other, even more outrageous price and then claiming that it’s therefore cheap is not something I’m going to fall for.
Hope the treasury yields moving up don’t wreck you, if yields move N%, then bond values move (N*years remaining)% down. Disregard if you buy individual bonds and hold until redemption.
The problem is that you could lose money for 10 years. 1970-80.
Mindless buying S&P 500 is great but you might want to do better. Most people will do worse if they try to beat the index but some people will do 20% a year for as long as they keep buying good businesses at good prices.
“Buying the dip” is a bad strategy if it’s not paired with understanding value. Dips are sometimes temporary overreactions or part of a continued decline. Enron had a big “dip” soon after reaching its high. I suppose if you bought the dip then sold very quickly after, you’d make money, but you’d have to choose the right dip.
"Buying the dip" as a strategy only makes sense in hindsight. Say it's late 2007 and you have some cash. On Sep 28 of that year, the VTI was at $75.60. By April 2008, it had fallen over 12% to around $66. But it would still go down even more. Same thing as in early 2020: the market falls 5%... do you buy then? Once it fell around 30%, could you identify that as the "bottom" given the information you had at the time?