Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
If you buy at regular intervals, and hold, you will end up taking advantage of the best times to buy and that will outperform your attempt to time, in my opinion. This is why nearly all investment advisers will tell you to put each month's retirement fund contribution to whatever your preferred allocation is, rather than putting it into cash and trying to self-manage when you invest it.
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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.