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good about buying into the markets when they’re expensive, and they won’t be as keen to buy when they’re on sale.
    I don’t want you to be like your neighbors. Avoid that kind of self-destructive behavior and you’ll increase your odds of building wealth as an investor.
    It’s Not Timing the Market that Matters; It’s Time in the Market
    There are smart people (and people who aren’t so smart) who mistakenly think they can jump in and out of the stock market at opportune moments. It seems simple. Get in before the market rises and get out before the market drops. This is referred to as “market timing.” But most financial advisers have a better chance beating Roger Federer in a tennis match than effectively timing the market for your account.
    Vanguard’s Bogle, who was named by Fortune magazine as one of the four investment giants of the twentieth century has this to say about market timing:
    After nearly 50 years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don’t even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. 3
    When the markets go raving mad, dramatically jumping in and out can be tempting. But stock markets are highly irrational and characterized by short-term swings. The stock market often will fly higher than most people expect during a euphoric phase, while plunging further than anticipated during times of economic duress. There’s a simple, annual, mechanical strategy that you can follow to protect your money from excessive crashes, which I’ll outline in Chapter 5. Your investment will still fall in value when the stock market falls, but not as much as your neighbor’s—and that can help you sleep better when the stock market isn’t cooperating.
    The strategy that I’ll show you doesn’t involve trying to guess the stock market’s direction. Forecasting where it’s going to go over a short period is like trying to guess which frantic, nightly moth is going to get singed by the light bulb first.
    Doing nothing but holding onto your total stock market index fund might sound boring during a financial boom and it might sound terrifying during a financial meltdown. But the vast majority of people (including professionals) who try jumping in and out of the stock market allow their emotional judgments to hurt their profits as they often end up buying high and selling low.
    What can you miss by guessing wrong?
    Studies show that most market moves are like the flu you got last year or like the mysterious $10 bill you found in the pocket of your jeans. In each case, you don’t see it coming. Even when looking back at the stock market’s biggest historical returns, Jeremy Siegel, a professor of business at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, suggests that there’s no rhyme or reason when it comes to market activity. He looked back at the biggest stock market moves since 1885 (focusing on trading sessions where the markets moved by five percent or more in a single day) and tried connecting each of them to a world event. 4
    In most instances, he couldn’t find logical explanations for such large stock market movements—and he had the luxury of looking back in time, and trying to match the market’s behavior with historical world news. If a smart man like Siegel can’t make connections between world events and the stock market movements with the benefit of hindsight, then how is someone supposed to predict future movements based on economic events—or the prediction of economic events to come? It’s as improbable as guessing which directional changes a frantic, unleashed 10-month-old Labrador retriever is going to make in an open field.
    If you’re ever convinced to act on somebody’s short-term stock market prediction, it could end up being a very expensive mistake. Let’s look at the U.S. stock