[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

You will take advance of good buying times some of the time doing that. Doing it my way, you take advantage of better buying times (you could still lose) almost 100% of the time. When the market is setting records every day, there will almost always be a better buying time down the road (the odds of this have got to be well over 90%). It behooves one to wait.

Timing with retirement funds rather than cash is different; because of the tax implications. If I didn't use my corporate 401K, took it as cash, and put it in I would be losing almost 50% of that money to the government immediately as taxable income before I even invest it at all. I contribute to my 401K without timing, because my timing won't overcome the fat income tax hit of the feds and my state.

If you would have waited at 14K, when the market had nearly doubled in a few years, you NEVER would have had another opportunity to buy at a better price and you would have missed 7 or 8 years of opportunities. And you would have sold, or at least not bought, AMZN at 100 which it never saw again. So it really wasn't so high after all even though it seemed so at the time.