Consistency and Investing
THE single most important thing you can do as an investor is remain consistent. I know what I’m about to say might shock you, but finance content creators/influencers/educators are not psychic. I have no crystal ball. I have NO idea what the price of any stock or ETF will be in six months or a year.
And if I make a prediction, literally all I’m doing is making a guess. And here’s a little insider trick a lot of finfluencers do (but they’ll never admit): They make TWO videos. One prediction with a high price target and one with a low price target. After the videos rack up a decent amount of comments, they set them both to private and in six months, when the stock has hit an insane high, they make THAT video public, repost it and say, “LOOK! I was right! That’s why you should follow me and BUY! MY! COURSE!”
And of course every clueless beginner investor rushes to their website to add their course to their cart.
What really matters isn’t sitting on the sidelines trying to WAIT for the most perfect moment to strike. What really matters is consistency. Now, I personally no longer have the need to dollar cost average as an investor. I have enough invested. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sit, waiting for some magic day to invest. I still exercise consistency.
If you aren’t fully invested, though, you should continue to dollar cost average. You don’t want to just STOP and say okay, at some magic moment, I’ll invest! When will that be? Will you pull the trigger? Will you panic and not invest because you think things are going lower? What if you’re wrong and that magic day never comes and instead, markets go up?
But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping a little extra cash on the side in ADDITION to your DCA money (if you can afford to do that), so you CAN pounce on dramatic down days.
But what am I talking about when I say DRAMATIC down days? When the S&P 500 drops 200 points? When the Dow Jones drops 300 points? No. I’m talking about 2000 point down days, 1000 point down days when every single talking head on the news is screaming. THAT is when I say, hm: we’ve got a big sell off today. Maybe I can go shopping.
And that’s just what I’ve done over the last month and a half when we’ve seen thousand point plus downdays in the markets.
In that time, I’ve added to the following investments and I am up on EVERY. SINGLE. ONE:
AAPL: ⬆️ 7%
META: ⬆️ 29%
NVDA: ⬆️ 38%
HIMS: ⬆️ 93%
AMZN: ⬆️ 14%
CAVA: ⬆️ 33%
SOFI: ⬆️ 22%
RIVN: ⬆️ 25%
ELF: ⬆️ 27%
Why? Did I just get lucky? Did I buy on the PERFECT day when each one of those stocks were at their LOWEST? Maybe? I donno. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. So what if I had waited one more day to buy ELF and then I coulda’ been up 29% instead? WHO. CARES? I’m up. I’m consistent. I take advantage of big down days.
It works for me. Maybe it’ll work for you, too.
