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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

They didn't discuss Peter Perfect's sister, Petra Perfect, who -- rather than just wait for the one bottom day for the year -- instead buys and sells repeatedly, throughout the year, at more local lows and highs.

Is that also considered market timing?

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I'll tell you the result: Petra would blow all the results out of the water with massive returns. But Peters results are theoretically somewhat more believable because he only needs to be lucky on one trade a year.

How do you know that you’re currently at a local low/high?

In the article, Peter Perfect has perfect market timing, but only buys once.

Petra Perfect also has perfect market timing, but can buy and sell repeatedly.

Sorry, then yes to answer your actual question, I don’t think that would commonly be called “market timing” (although of course the phrase could be an apt description of that strategy).

All the uses of that expression that I see refer to an investor whose principal aim is to buy-and-hold to capture beta, but simply wants to try and pick the right moment.

That sure counts as market timing.

Pulling out such a strategy would make you insanely rich.

To quantify “insanely”,

$1 in the 1900 stock market would be $52000 today. In the 1900 T-bill market, $58. If you knew how to perfectly rebalance every Jan 1, $22.3m.

At a guess they'd lose all their money in transaction costs.

Transaction cost is little O of most significant trading strategies, imho.

Depends heavily on the timescale. 0.1% slippage is irrelevant if you hold for years but a serious problem if you trade every hour.

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