Chris Walsh

It's not hard.

So people may get paid, say they've got like a thousand dollars to invest and they're looking at it thinking, oh, I'll wait till the S&P or whatever drops.

And so they're missing it.

They're trying to time it, but no one can time it.

And so there's this sense that I don't want to overpay for stuff, but you've just got to go for it because otherwise you're going to sit on the fence.

Now, if you do want to not time it, but also minimize the risk, you can take that thousand dollars and you can drip feed it over three days.

or five days.

And so you can do, and so basically that's dollar cost averaging it.

You can put $200 in on Monday.

I mean, this works well with funds because you're not paying a transaction charge per brokerage.

You're looking for the long-term.

If the S&P drops 12% in a day, 5% in a day, that's a significant event or something like that.

People try to time it and just go for it because it is time in the market, which means for a lot of people, their investing timeframe will be 20, 30, 40 years.

They'll want to turn that money, which they've saved into income payouts.

Usually that's what happens when you retire, you just drip feed yourself it and plus your super.

And you want to be in the market long enough to accumulate more so you can move your lifestyle up from X to Y. Time in the market means you're going to be there for the long run.

And it doesn't matter what the Dow did or what the S&P did or what the NASDAQ did or what the NZX did on the Tuesday versus Friday versus the following Monday.

It doesn't matter.

Long term.

It's tricky by the time you get a stock tip from someone at a barbecue.