I come on here daily and see the same thing, posts predicting where the market’s headed next. Covid, tariffs, Iran war, whatever the headline is. Same fear, different day, everyone’s got a crystal ball calling the next bottom or the next 30% drop.
I started pouring my cash savings into the market during the tariff war last year, from February through April. I knew I’d never be able to time the bottom, so I just kept averaging down my positions as the market continued to fall. “You bought too early, it’s dropping another 20-30% from here.” I kept buying into April and was down over 15%. My portfolio was up 35% by year end.
If you’re buying quality stocks and funds you actually believe in long term, there’s nothing better than buying them at a discount. If people had a crystal ball to know where the market bottoms and picks up, they’d be betting their life savings at those levels, not posting on Reddit.
You might get lucky trying to time the market, but your chances doing so are as good as betting on a roulette table. What works for someone investing $100 will be very different from someone deploying $100k. Get ideas from Reddit, discuss and see how others are analyzing investments and events, but don’t let fear from strangers on the internet stop you from building your way to financial success.
Posted by Ok_Green_6969
16 Comments
Why did you have so much cash?
Reddit has been the worst investment I’ve ever made in 8 years of being in the market. Get me back to 185 so I can offload my bags. I’m down over 20k lol
This is great advice, thank you
> Get ideas from Reddit
Worst advice ever. There is no wisdom of the crowds. If people are parroting the same thing it’s generally better to do the exact opposite.
Ignore the news period. All short term noise. No one can consistently time the market.
Sometimes major world events shift things completely. We are early on in one of those events. Ignore it if you want! The smart ones will be adjusting.
There are so many smug folks around here that think smart investing means never making any adjustments or changes. Absolutely wild to observe.
Between this, r/ETFs and r/stocks the days I get most excited about are the days when everyone seems to be pissing themselves about whether there will ever be a green day again. It’s usually folks who’ve never seen a bear market before.
Barring something as fast acting as the flash crash or 1987’s Black Monday I’ll probably be able to set myself up to profit on the downward move. And if it is that fast, I just need to make sure to take advantage of the rebound.
Getting scared never does an investor any good, and it does a trader a whole lot worse.
Averaging in and putting money into an S&P500 fund until you reach $100K is the way, then diversify. Many says keep your money there and continue to invest. One cannot time the market. The issue is investments firm time the market, that is how they make money. If you let emotions guide your decision then the market will have it’s way with you.
This is the place that likes to saY TACO TACO. But then, will sit on the sidelines with cash and then keep screeching when the market keeps going up. I think I lost my trust in conversation here when people started downvoting me for saying the boglehead/DCA approach is best for the majority of the people on here.
The ‘don’t try to time the bottom’ part is fair. But posts like this also have a lot of hindsight baked in. Averaging down looks brilliant when the market rebounds quickly.
If the drawdown had lasted 3+ years instead of a few months, the story would read very differently.
Ask yourselves… do you think things are trending toward less volatility and geopolitical risk, or more? I am in the second camp.
Why wasn’t you cash savings already in the market before the tariff war?
Everyone has been predicting a “bubble pop like 2008” for the past 5 years.
If you listen to them you would’ve missed so many gains.
some people keep saying this no matter how much the market goes down. yes yes it will EVENTUALLY go up but the key word is eventually.. it could go way downnnnnn in the meantime.
These people were largely wrong in April.
Follow them at your peril
Buying and holding for the long term is quite literally the easiest form of investing possible and people still fuck it up because they can’t stomach any volatility.
Reddit is still better than X where every week some anon account is saying to sell everything, buy generators and supplies, and get ready for the apocalypse because the stock market “crashed” 2%.
Tldr; Don’t be a headline investor.