I no longer a believer that most people have the financial acumen to time the market well, either buying stuff the low end or selling at the high. A lot of this is sheer damn luck.
As such, financial strategies meant to capitalize on single one time events, imho, are doomed to fail for most people for two reasons
1. You could predict wrong on the outcome of the one time Hail Mary event that may or may not happen the way you think, no matter how smart you think you are.
2. In waiting for that one time event and doing nothing in the meantime, you are giving up a lot of opportunity that could add up and cost you a fortune over time.
A good example of this was my stupid decision to sell a good percentage of my stocks right before Mr. Trump became President Trump thinking his election was going to crater the economy for a long long time. I was correct for about 1 week, and then the markets bounced right back as if it was a non event… Fortunately I got right back into it my investments and kept a consistent buy and hold for the long term and regular monthly drip drip drip contribution to index funds both pre and post tax contributions…and those long term, small decision that didn’t count on a big bang event ended up being some of the better decisions. Of course there were optimizations to those decisions that were made to take advantage of short term changes….For example, moving more money invested the damr index funds into 529 college savings plan when the administration changed the tax law for 529 plans and investing less in after tax investment plans into the same index funds to saving on capital gains taxes. But that was about it.
