You are trying to time the market. If your goal isn’t to cash out within a year, don’t look at the prices, just buy S&P index fund like VTI and a bonds fund in some proportion. Rule of thumb is 100 - your age is the percentage that goes into stock fund, your age is percentage that goes into bonds.
The strategy I described is sometimes called “time cost averaging”
It is a form of timing the market. The idea is to buy at about the average price over some time period to avoid getting bitten by volatility.
For reasons not involving investments, I had to have a large cash position until we were well into the recovery from the last crash.
Buying index funds at all time highs during the biggest economic downturn of our lifetimes is a bit much to stomach, so I’m spreading the purchase out over time.
One other thing, I recommended a robo over a manually rebalanced vti/bond split because they include some money in foreign indexes (increasing diversification), and auto-rebalance. Some also do fancy stuff like tax loss harvesting.
All of that complexity supposedly beats simple manual approaches by a percentage point or two (after tax).
From what I understand, the global economy has become so intertwined that 90% of the time domestic and foreign markets will mirror each other anyways. The example I was given is that the Taiwanese life insurance industry is larger than the US mortgage industry and how they both affect global markets. I personally like a mix of S&P500, treasury bonds index, small cap domestic, and a foreign stocks index. And a good robo that gives me that mix with a 0.07% fee or whatever like VTI does could be great. But if the fees are higher than that, I’ll balance it myself.
