A really interesting thing happened in March 2020. The market crashed and we all remember how gloomy everything looked. Needless to say, some businesses were going to be directly affected by Covid (eg: travel, hospitality) and their stocks went down as much as 80%. But it also became clear that many stocks were just collateral damage (eg: most of the tech stocks), and that they were going to recover more quickly than others. I bought all the tech stocks I could and things worked out great. If anything, I gave myself too much time to execute on this strategy - as a way to protect against the market tanking even further, I decided to dollar-cost average and make my investments over a 6-week period between mid March and end of April. As is obvious in hindsight, the mid-March cohort outperformed the late April cohort by a wide margin. Writing about this in April 2021 doesn't seem so surprising, but I can tell you that in April 2020 I was shocked how fast the market was improving even though the global news only kept getting worse and worse. I am close with many people who run their own businesses, and many of them had their worst weeks in April. I guess the market was recovering following the same rationale that I used, so I shouldn't be too surprised about its behavior, but it was still interesting considering how my risk profile is so different from the majority of other people.
Would I recommend timing the market? Most of the time, no. But a lot of people talk about the impact of the 10 best or worst days in the last 20 years, and I would say those "insane periods" do exhibit somewhat recognizable patterns that makes it possible to identify them and take advantage of.
I get the gist of your response and it certainly has some merit. But I would push back on the black or white presentation of your point - stock allocations certainly do matter, as you can easily confirm by playing with a few what-if scenarios in the past 12 months.
The high-level point of my parent comment was to not run away from market crashes, and instead to buy stocks that are a part of the collateral damage as opposed to those that are directly connected to the root cause of the sell-off. I think this strategy will work regardless of Fed's actions, within reason (eg: the financial system doesn't collapse altogether).
It is also very easy to talk about all of this in hindsight.
Prior to April 2020 I had 100% of my 401K in cash/equivalents.
In April 2020 I put half of that cash into stocks.
Now, of course, I kick myself and say I should have put most/all of it into stocks back then.
But that kind of "of course!" and "that was such a recognizable pattern!" talk is a lot easier in hindsight.
It's easy to forget what it was like at the time, and that it could have easily gone down even further. At the time, the cat was both dead and alive (market recovers vs. market falls further).
> Prior to April 2020 I had 100% of my 401K in cash/equivalents.
I am not a financial advisor, but that sounds like an unusual strategy regardless of your age.
> It's easy to forget what it was like at the time, and that it could have easily gone down even further.
The only thing that matters is where it will come back, and when. Eg, once Facebook dipped below 50%, you were quite likely to make a profit on that buy in the next 2 years no matter how much further it was going to go in that time frame.
Would I recommend timing the market? Most of the time, no. But a lot of people talk about the impact of the 10 best or worst days in the last 20 years, and I would say those "insane periods" do exhibit somewhat recognizable patterns that makes it possible to identify them and take advantage of.