Patience is a virtue – particularly when it comes to investing. We might agonise about the ‘right time’ to invest, but data shows us that the old saying is correct: it's time in the market, rather than timing the market that tends to pay off.
Analysts at RBC took the hypothetical case of an investor planning to move $3,000 of cash into a balanced portfolio every year, starting in 2004. An investor with perfect timing would put their funds into the market at its lowest point each year. After 20 years, their pot would have grown to $136,000, as the chart below shows.