Understanding Market Timing
Let’s start with the market timing approach that usually revolves around speculative decisions. Following this approach, investors rely on reading the market trends to make instant purchase or sale decisions in the stock market.
While many argue that market timing is not an ideal approach as it lacks fundamental reasoning and is inefficient in beating market fluctuations, many continue to rely on this for their investments.
Understanding Time in the Market
Time in the market talks about investments made not only financially but mentally as it requires the investor to stay invested in the security for a long period of time. Time in the market approach is considered reliable as it helps an investor stay at peace and away from panic decisions.
Under this approach, the investor does not touch the security unless:
Why Do Stock Markets Move Upwards?
Now, being in the stock market a question that often pops up in our heads is what makes the stock market move upwards?
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons that stay consistent every time the market moves upwards:
The stock market functions on a simple supply and demand chain. When the demand for assets goes up the prices go up.
The ability of an asset class to earn more pushes the stock market to move upwards as investors are willing to enter with huge pockets.
Time, Market Timing, and All-Time Highs
Now that you have gained a fair share of information on timing the market vs time in the market, let’s move ahead with the next big question. What is the right time to invest?
On average, investors find it challenging to enter the market during all-time highs because of the fear of these highs being a rare occurrence and they tend to wait for corrections.
However, looking at the data over tha past two decades, it is safe to say that all-time highs are anything but a rare occurrence.
Let’s take the example of Nifty 50 between the years 2000 to 2022. The stock market has hit a new high in nearly every five months thus pushing the profitability to an unpredictable extent. Infact, since 2013 there have been new highs every year excluding 2016.
While choosing the time to invest your money is a personal call, remember that with businesses making profits the stock market is meant to show new highs in the coming years, as well.
Top 3 Reasons Time In the Market Is Better Than Market Timing
The advantages of choosing time in the market over market timing have been discussed time and again.
Take a look at these three reasons that will get you on board to follow time in the market approach:
Predicting the movement of stocks requires extreme due diligence and for you to be on your feet at all times. Unfortunately, even acquiring these skills can not promise an accurate prediction of stock movements. Additionally, market timing demands you to search “market timings today” a hundred times in a day.
Short-term underperformance is a common phenomenon even with proficiently managed funds.
Investors engaged with the market timing approach tend to overlook the transaction cost of frequently selling and purchasing stocks that over time accumulate into a huge amount.
Conclusion
Stock market movements are hard to predict and even though market timing can help in certain specific situations, for a relaxed investment experience and to gain steady profit time in the market approach is arguably a smarter choice.
As Kaustubh Belapurkar, CFA and Director and Melvyn Santarita Analyst said, “Over the long haul, the stock market outperformance over cash boils down to just a few critical months. Miss those months and you will have missed all the risk premium to be earned from holding a volatile asset such as equities."
Disclaimer: Investments in the securities market are subject to market risk, read all related documents carefully before investing.
This content is for educational purposes only. Securities quoted are exemplary and not recommendatory.
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