Anonymous wrote:Better to place your order just before the market closes so that you know whether it is up or down. Doing it at night or in the mirning would be the worst time to place an order b/c you have little idea what will happen before your mutual fund is priced....assuming you are buying a fund.

This for sure.

If you wait for the market to go down from today, then you'll be buying lower than today. But that doesn't mean anything moving forward--it might fall just as much the day after that, so it will turn out you bought high.

Invest when you're ready to invest. If you have the luxury of doing it gradually, then put money in over time to balance out the risk. Or just dump it all in and don't look at the highs and lows after that if you don't want to deal with the timing factor.

Better to place your order just before the market closes so that you know whether it is up or down. Doing it at night or in the mirning would be the worst time to place an order b/c you have little idea what will happen before your mutual fund is priced....assuming you are buying a fund.

No one else cares what you do. Invest when you want.

Because the market may be at the bottom already and tomorrow it might be higher. Then again, the market might crash tomorrow. What you can likely count on is that in "many many years" that the market will be higher than it is today.

If I have $20k ready to invest in a stock index fund - tell me why I should not wait for the next big market drop and invest that evening or the following morning. Seems like that would ensure I am buying low (or at least lower than now). I am not in a rush to invest and given market swings of late, it seems like we will have a few more large market drop days. If the answer is it could always go lower, if I invested today that investment would have gone lower too — once it’s in, I don’t plan on touching for many many years. But everyone always says don’t time the market. What am I missing?