[quote=ltsdd]DRIP and Profit-locking (aka buy low, sell high) are not mutually exclusive.[/quote]

DRIP investing assumes a regular interval contribution to a passive investment that you don’t muck around with.

Trying to “buy low or sell high” is market timing and wouldn’t be considered DRIP “investing”….

Regularly saving money off to the side also isn’t DRIP investing.. It’s DRIP savings….

If you’re regularly saving and then trying to move a large chunk into the markets at the low points, even if it’s just a basket of index funds, that’s market timing and not drip investing. My coworker had $20k extra from a bonus and wanted to start investing in the stock market last year. He wanted to move the entire $20k at once into a backet of index funds when he thought the market was low. I advised him against that, and told him beyond moving the $3000 initial required investment into a index fund, just spread the rest of the $17k over a timed automatic investment into the same index fund…. He didn’t listen and moved the entire amount into one index fund thinking he could time the markets… It didn’t work out, and the market went down, and so did his net worth. Had he just made regular small contributions into the same index fund each month, he would have caught both the high and low points and done better this day.

Market timing might work a few times if you are lucky. It’s unlikely you are smarter than the markets over the longer period of the time… I am sure if you ask some folks that sat out the markets for the past 10 years waiting for the big crash, the their investment accounts will tell a story whether trying to outsmart the markets actually worked….