Buy and hold’s your best bet

Stockmarkets breed day traders constantly looking to profit from short-term price swings. But is a strategy of trying to sell at all the market's peaks and troughs actually a good one?

Heavy motorway traffic always exposes life's market-timers drivers who fruitlessly dart in and out of lanes in search of a short cut. Similarly, stockmarkets breed day traders constantly looking to profit from short-term price swings. But is a strategy of trying to sell at all the market's peaks and buy in its troughs actually a good one?

The first problem with it is the number of methods that claim to throw up clear buy and sell signals to follow. You could copy directors' deals, sell after profit warnings, track share-price moving averages, look for repetitions of chart patterns, check the position of the planets, and so on. Trouble is there is a mountain of evidence showing that none of them really work.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up

Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.