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Is this a good time to start buying as everyone is selling/panicking?


It's always a good time to buy if you're doing dollar cost averaging into index funds.

Trying to time the market is probably a fools game, much better spent trying to avoid total ruin.


Yup, I DCA regularly, but thinking about whether this is a good opportunity to throw extra into an index fund like VTSAX or maybe solid individual stocks.

Extra would be coming from an account that I keep cash in for unforeseen opportunities.


As a rule of thumb, it's better to buy when the market's in the red than when it's doing well. As Warren Buffet said, "keep buying it through thick and thin, and especially through thin." (He was referring to an S&P 500 index fund.)


You should be buying index funds with a portion of every paycheck


Shouldn't you do this in a bull?


In a bull market you get things for cheap, with the expectation that the bull market will end long enough before your retirement that those assets will increase in value. You basically bought those assets at a discount. Bonus!

Closer to retirement, you wouldn't want to take on that much risk, so you'd move (over time, as you get closer to retirement) to more stable investments. Target-date mutual funds[0] do this automatically.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_date_fund


You always do it so you don’t have to question the timing. If you do it during a bill, you’re waiting until the price is going up. Doing it during a bear gets you when the price is going down. Buy low sell high and all that jazz.


I should have included "also".




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