I would have saved myself a bunch of losses if I had done it when I was thinking about it.
When you have invested in something, did you do your DD or did you do it because everyone else did it?
I would recommend a book called "the intelligent investor". I also recommend low fee mutual funds that track the market as the default thing to invest. Once you educate yourself more you can make more sophisticated investments.
I also don't have anything against speculative investments. Just don't call it investing. It's gambling and it's fine as long as you know what you are doing and are okay with basically losing most (everything) you put in.
There are countless well-capitalized and mostly underperforming hedge funds that were built on this premise.
No this is the exact opposite. It’s like passive vs active https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/markettiming.asp
But you can certainly time the market using "buy and hold", by waiting for the right moment to buy. And even if you buy "asap", you're still employing a market-timing strategy, that "buying asap is better than buying later".
Dollar-cost averaging is a form of timing the market, because you're effectively reasoning that fixed-interval purchase will fare better than lump sump or other strategies. You're still predicting market behavior.
Good resource:
Yes that is timing the market because you wait for a certain time point, as opposed to just buy once you have enough liquidity.
> Dollar-cost averaging is a form of timing the market
No it’s not. It’s like saying passive is a form of active investment because some group of people pick the stocks that come into an index. Timing the market is betting on a given change, while dollar cost averaging is based on empirical analysis and is independent of the events the investor thinks will happen.
I mean the difference is actually simple and clear. One investor is telling “I bet something will happen soon“, the other “I have no idea what will happen”. It could hardly be more clear cut.
I think the confusion arises when we split hairs, that timing is predicting explicit events, or on a short time scale. But I want to zoom out: making decisions based on large scale patterns and trends, including “the s&p always goes up over a long time”, or “the future tends to behave like the past”, (things that are absolutely not guaranteed to happen, and require belief and betting), is a form of timing.
There's also the emotional side we are kind of neglecting here.
“Don’t time the market” is most certainly not stupid advice.
Not to mention, the insane stock price gains in tech in general had all but stopped, NFT scams were at there height, and it just looked like things were going south to me. Turned out my feeling was right.
Or, alternatively, you might have cashed out when you thought you should, then completely missed the bottom trying to time it, then sat on cash for years, watching it lose value to inflation anyway.