[quote=AN]There’s a difference between trying to time the market by staying in cash for a long extended period time to buy and sell at the time you think its optimal and to not participate in the market for a few days while you wait for an event to occur that can potentially crater the market. Once the event happened, then you’d buy back in at whatever price it is. That’s not timing the market. That’s just remove risk from your portfolio for a short period of time.[/quote]

Yes timing the market for a long duration is much worse than what you did which is more like risk adversion. But I would think most people who sold did not get back in right away like you did missing out on the rally. My problem was as the market kept going up without a correction, I stayed out since it just seemed more likely that there would be a correction.