Pulled the trigger

[ziggy29]

Stock markets do not only go in one direction. Take a look a the Nekkie.

With all due respect, anyone with a pulse and is even remotely attentive has lived through the last 10 years and knows this quite well. I don't think anyone claims that markets **only** go up over time.

 

[dex]

With all due respect, anyone with a pulse and is even remotely attentive has lived through the last 10 years and knows this quite well. I don't think anyone claims that markets **only** go up over time.

With even more due respect - I did not say that *** anyone *** did claim that.

I am making that point in consideration of the threads that have been closed recently.

 

[slingshot]

back story, from the, hello I'm forum: We had always sent the same amount of money every month to our mutual funds, DCA, but when we fired our FA, he put is all in cash-therefore, we had to choose a point to get back in, making us market timers for the first time ever!
We had decided that Feb 1 was a deadline, as we now had January's $$ to put someplace, so we took a portion of the cash, bought the index funds and now I'm DCA again.
My tremble was from buying in at the highest market in 2 years.

 

[easysurfer]

back story, from the, hello I'm forum: We had always sent the same amount of money every month to our mutual funds, DCA, but when we fired our FA, he put is all in cash-therefore, we had to choose a point to get back in, making us market timers for the first time ever!
We had decided that Feb 1 was a deadline, as we now had January's $$ to put someplace, so we took a portion of the cash, bought the index funds and now I'm DCA again.
My tremble was from buying in at the highest market in 2 years.

Slingshot,

I'd still say you are more readjusting than market timing.

For example, maybe you invested in 3 index funds w/Vanguard (Min $3000 to open the accounts). That's $9000 from your cash to the funds. Then maybe you set up your accounts for automatic exchange (DCA'ing made easy) from your cash to index funds each month, same amount, same interval. That doesn't sound like market timing to me, but setting up for DCA'ing.

On the otherhand, say if after consolidating all your accounts into cash and you had $100K in cash, but plop a good portion of that into equities thinking now is a high. However, you consider pulling out of the market when you think equities are going down. That I'd call market timing.

As another example, when I reallocate at the start of the year. My equity versus fixed income percentages may be out of whack. Last year was a good year for stocks. So by rebalancing, if I put $20K from my stock index to bonds, even though it's a high for now, I wouldn't call that market timing, but just reallocating. I'm still moving a chunk of money from one asset class to another. But that's only to rebalance, not to time the market.