Time in the Market vs Timing the Market: 45 Years of Data
We ran a Perfect Timer, a Worst Timer and a Consistent Investor through 45 years of real S&P 500 data. One of them lost. It is not the one most people guess.
£10,000 in the S&P 500 over 1985-2024 - what missing the best days costs
Illustrative model based on JPMorgan and Putnam best-days analyses.
Key takeaways
Using real S&P 500 data from 1980 to 2025, a Consistent Investor who invests $200 every month beats a Perfect Timer who impossibly nails the bottom of every major crash - Black Monday, the dot-com bust, 2008, Covid, all of them.
Even the Worst Timer, who invests at the exact peak before every crash, still builds serious wealth over the long term. Staying invested matters far more than getting the entry point right.
The real risk is not buying at the wrong time. It is not buying at all. Every year spent waiting for a crash is a year of compounding you never get back.