When buying investments that fluctuate in price such as stocks or ETF, you could be buying at the time when its price is high or when it’s low. It will be great if you can time the market and only buy when its low but that’s practically impossible to do since no one really knows what the price will be in the future.
It’s impossible to accurately predict the price of a stock or ETF for a specific date or period of time. Anyone can make a prediction that it will go up or go down in the long term but that’s still a guess and there’s no guarantee that it will come true.
Those who don’t want to time the market use the dollar cost averaging (DCA) method when investing. This is achieved by putting money in the investment on a regular basis. There will be times when the money will be buying shares at the time when they are expensive and times when they are cheap. In the long run the average purchase price for those investment will be lower than its future price assuming it continues to trend upward.
The good thing about DCA is that you can automate it and you no longer have to stress about the price of the shares. You are accepting the fact that sometimes it will be expensive and sometimes it will be cheap. The hope is that in the long run you will be making profit if the price trends upward.