Self-discipline is one of the important trait required for successful investing. People without self-discipline cannot select the right investment options suitable to them and stay invested when the stock market falls. One question that keeps cropping up on people’s minds while investing is: What is the Appropriate Time to invest in Equities?

Investors keep coming up with their own ideas so to how investing after the market falls to a certain extent can yield them better returns. Many investors even keep postponing their investments waiting for the market to fall.

All these waiting tactics come under one single fallacy that has the potentiality to doom investors, i.e. ‘Trying to time market’. There is no point in trying to wait for the market to fall because the market may not fall for long periods of time. A review of the history of the American stock market shows that the markets may rally for longer periods of time than what we assume. For example, the American market was rallying continuously between the years 1982 to 2000. One of the lengthiest bull runs in the history of the global stock markets. Investors who thought the market was expensive and waited for it to fall have mostly missed the spectacular returns given by the market during that period.

Similarly, by the end of the 2015, many analysts were predicting that the stock market would fall after a prolonged bull run. But that never happened. Does anybody in the world know when the stock market would rise or fall? The answer for this question is: ‘absolutely no’.

fallacies of stock market investing

In the initial days when I started investing, I too fell prey to this common mistake. As I used to invest in mutual funds in the first week of the month after my salary was credited, I used to be concerned when the market rose steeply on the day when I was investing in the market. My general assumption was that the market may ultimately fall after a steep rise and I could get a better price if could wait for a day or two. Many a times, the result after the wait was that the market would rise further. I used to give up and buy the securities for a slightly higher price than the date I ought to have invested.

Now, coming to the answer for the question posed in the title of this article: What is the Appropriate Time in Equities?

The best time to invest in the markets is every minute the market is open for trading. Every day is a good day for investing.

There is no point in waiting for the market to fall. Sometimes, it may never fall in the foreseeable future or for years altogether. If you way wait for the market to fall and it keeps on rising, you may ultimately end up paying more price for the same stock or a mutual fund unit later.

To repeat again: ‘Never, never try to time the market’.