It will be great if you can time the market and buy an investment when it’s price is low and sell when it’s high. In order to achieve this you have to guess right both times, which has a probability of 25%. And that’s just for that transaction. If you do this multiple times, then your probability of being right all the time become significantly lower because being right the first time already has low probability and being right twice is even lower and so on. So winning and becoming rich with this strategy has very low chance of happening.
Another problem with timing the market is you could be wasting a lot of time. If you wait for the price to go down, you could be waiting for a very long time and it may not even happen. The price could be going up and when it goes down later it’s still higher than when you started waiting. It is better to invest your money regularly rather than holding it and waiting for that opportunity to get a lower price. It could take years before you get that opportunity and by that time your potential gain will be negated by the gains that your money would have made if you decided to invest it back then.
As I discussed in one of my notes, time is a very important factor in becoming a millionaire, the more time your money has in investment the more chance it can grow due to dividends and snowball effect. So don’t try to time it, just have a regular contribution to your investment regardless of the condition of the market.