I knew in the abstract that trying to time the market is stupid, but to be fair, “timing the market” and “making judgments about what you think are reasonable entry points” can look similar to someone not completely green but not experienced either. But then I read an article on Seeking Alpha that used a lot of data to show just how *little* you'd improve your returns even if you timed the market *perfectly*, over and over. Meanwhile, if you hold out to try and hit the bottom or even just really close to it, and you don't time it perfectly, you can easily miss returns of 60-170% in short order.
This made me realize just how different it was having the wildly low “entry points” I'd set on my desired stocks and making reasonable judgments of justified valuations and what that meant for which of my planned purchases to jump on come Monday. I was badly screwing up, and I hope admitting that can help a bunch of other inexperienced investors escape the foolishness I was committing.
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