Your Brain Can't Handle The Stock Market

Ted

FYI; We have said a good deal in this space about the futility of trying to time short-term market moves (see e.g., this, this and this). No one has demonstrated the ability to do this consistently over time. While it is possible to avoid the very largest of collapses over long periods of time using a simply trend-following approach (see Meb Faber’s "A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation"), the shorter the time horizon, the more difficult this becomes.

Thus, forecasting near-term market moves is an exercise in futility.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-21/your-brain-cant-handle-the-stock-market

MaxBialystock

Witty AND smart: "The good news is that enlightenment and self-knowledge leads to improvement. If you are aware of your cognitive errors, if you know what you are doing wrong you can at least put into place steps to ensure you are no longer your own worst enemy. The bad news? It's really hard to do."

Tampabay

I don't know any investor that doesn't "time" the stock market, how would NOT time your purchases/sales? Sell/Buy Willy Nilly?, that's investor's mistake!

Mark

I wouldn't put people who make automatic investments or withdraw systematically from retirement accounts in the "timing" category. I also don't know what it's like for folks contributing to 401k plans and similar but I believe even those investments are not truly planned other than the withdrawals from their paychecks.

Tampabay

I didn't think we were talking about automatic payments in retirement accounts, thought we were talking about everyday investing, that is buying and selling, you better "time".... other words have a plan