Can You Time the Market Without Crying? via Attain Capital
We’ve all seen pictures like this one from Putnam showing how bad of an idea it is to miss the 10 best days in the stock market…
Chart Courtesy: Putnam
But we read an interesting post on trying to time trading systems (that’s like timing market timing) that seemed to approach this in a bit more logical way. You see – it doesn’t make much sense to talk about missing the 10, or 20, or 40 best single days in the stock market. Most market timers aren’t trying to avoid a single bad day, and get back in the next day. Most are looking at things like Price to Earnings ratios and the rest are trying to avoid bad periods… not just bad days. Plus, nobody is that unlucky trying to time the market that they miss just the 10 best days over a few decades. On the flip-side, nobody is that lucky that they would magically miss the worst market days over 10 to 20 years, only to get right back in the next day.
It makes much more sense to us to talk about what missing the best streaks of days looks like. The best 10 and 30 days periods, for instance. That would be a lot more interesting; to see how bad/good you would have been if you picked the exact wrong/right time.
Here’s what we found:
(Note: These figures do not represent actual trading, and were not taken from real experiences)
(Disclaimer: Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results)
(Note: The figures and charts above are an example and do not represent actual trading)
In our opinion, the better argument for not trying to time would go something like this:
Trying to time the market?
- If you’re incredibly smart, or lucky, or both – missing the worst 10 day streak would save you 549%
- If you’re incredibly dumb, unlucky, or both – missing the best 10 day streak would cost you 212%
- If you’re somewhere in between smart and dumb and have average luck – you’ll likely not miss anything… with missing the average 10 day streak resulting in 4%
We’re not sure if this supports timing or not – but it sure seems a better way to talk about it, rather than the more prevalent narrative about the big danger of missing the best 10 days in the stock market – like they come one right after the other or you’re the unluckiest person on the planet. The whole thing is kind of silly anyway – as it is backwards looking, and would need to be completely thrown out the window if the next 30 years were the negative image of the past 30 years, with stocks returning –70% over the span. If that happens, then timing would do no good, again – it would be better to not be involved at all…
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