TIMING TROUBLE

While many equity investors try to time market tops and bottoms to improve returns, their results have only gotten worse since Covid. Between 1/1/2015 and 12/31/2019, market timing attempts across a variety of actively traded mutual-fund styles cost investors 0.53 percentage points/year. However, from 1/1/2020 through 10/21/24, value destruction from poor timing almost doubled to 1.01 percentage points/year. This deterioration is probably because more do-it-yourself investors began playing the market.