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>Whether market timing is ever a viable investment strategy is controversial. Some may consider market timing to be a form of gambling based on pure chance, bec

>Whether market timing is ever a viable investment strategy is controversial. Some may consider market timing to be a form of gambling based on pure chance, because they do not believe in undervalued or overvalued markets. The efficient-market hypothesis claims that financial prices always exhibit random walk behavior and thus cannot be predicted with consistency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_timing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_timing What you are planning seems like a good idea but buying bottoms can be really hard. Lot of info in that wiki article. I like that you are thinking about it though! That already puts you ahead of a lot of the game.

pmiller2 7y ago
We can't really say that any individual point in time is "the" bottom, but it's obvious just looking at pricing data that we are at "a" bottom. The S&P 500 is down where it was about 3 years ago, and the Dow is similarly situated. If you buy primarily indices, this drop is a bit like time travelling 3 years in the past to buy. And, it's hard to argue that that's not a better deal than buying, say, in December.
- v64 7y ago
  > We can't really say that any individual point in time is "the" bottom, but it's obvious just looking at pricing data that we are at "a" bottom. I don't know if we can even say that. It's entirely plausible that the market continues to move down for months or years as the economic reality starts to become clearer. When the actual bottom is put in, March 2020 might look like "the end of the top", not "the start of the bottom".