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Comment by gassiss | Hacker News Reader

"You can't time the markets" doesn't mean it's not possible. It means if you do, it's luck

Timing the market is often read literally, like someone bought or sold at peaks and bottoms. But a lot of people saw the bear markets coming. Whether they sold in November or August, they correctly timed. Buy and hold investors made the wrong move by holding. It was obvious then to many.

There's a classic scam (I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know it) where the scammer gives out predictions for some stock or other: they pick their (large) group of targets, then send half a prediction that it will rise, and the other half that it will fall. After the appropriate time passes, they are proven right to one half, and wrong to the other.

Then they take the half they got right, and do the same thing again. After a few iterations, their pool of marks is smaller...but they also believe that the scammer is never wrong. (I believe the scammer then tells them they need to put a large sum down—which the scammer will, of course, handle for them...and then absconds with it.)

You're focusing on the ones who got it right, ignoring the ones who got it wrong, and calling it smarts. It's very unlikely to be so. The market as a whole should always be treated no differently than the scammer's entire initial pool of marks.

John Allen Paulos describes this in his book, Innumeracy.

(Excellent book, by the way)

Bob Hope does this in the beginning of "The Lemon Drop Kid," but with horses instead of stocks.

You forget that you have to time the market correctly 2 times. 1 time when selling, and 1 time when buying back in.

Show me the person who can consistently time the market.

The data is pretty clear on this one: even the professional investors that did better than the index in one period, were not able to do the same in the following period.

Buy and hold, there is nothing better. Try to be smart and you will lose.

But you're using the results of a Pachinko machine to say that some balls knew the right place to land. There have been people pulling money because a crash is coming any day since the start of the bull market. Sure, it's possible to time the market but it's equally possible to make the wrong prediction.

> Whether they sold in November or August, they correctly timed. Buy and hold investors made the wrong move by holding. It was obvious then to many.

In a decade or so I strongly believe my investment will be up significantly from those November numbers. I won't care what happens right now, it literally doesn't effect my plans to withdraw the cash when I retire.

Bears have been predicting the next recession every year since 2008, and calling it "obvious" too. The ones who got the timing wrong -- most of them -- slink away, while the ones who more or less got it right will brag for the next decade. So it goes.

I know it's read literally, that's why I explained what it actually means

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