Yeah buying the dip doesn't always work as advertised. I thought the NASDAQ was near bottom when I bought 120 shares TQQQ recently at $53.20 and then I watched it go down in flames. Yeah I shoulda dumped it and bought SQQQ and rode that to the REAL bottom, but yesterday vindicated me. Markets as a whole always go up. There will never be a forever record high. Back to the TQQQ example, not so long ago it was at $91.68 and it will go higher than that. Maybe kinda soon. Maybe not so soon. But it will go higher. If you have good diversity and you buy MARKET dips and not individual stock pick dips, and you don't expose yourself to margin calls and forced liquidation, in the bigger picture you will do okay. My accounts got really low for a while. Too many great ideas. Too much day/hour/minute trading. Getting stopped out. Not setting a stop and then selling the dip in a panic. Not selling the dip in a panic and watching it spiral down and then selling in despair. Watching it bounce back up off the bottom after I am out of the trade. The bigger picture, weeks, months, even years, won't make you the gains that day trading has the POTENTIAL to make, but that's where the steady money is. Back to TQQQ since I got the chart playing on yahoo and cnbc and tradingview, you could have bought this "dangerously volatile leveraged loser ETF that nobody in his right mind buys and holds even overnight" and held it, at any time before mid 2020 and be quite happy with it anytime since September of the same year. Yeah it did a massive face plant. Woe is me, money gone gone gone, and you still have profit in line with most managed funds, and beat the pants off the average day trader or perhaps I should say wannabe day trader. Two years is nothing. Now it is probably headed for the moon. And it will eventually find a resistance ceiling that slaps it back into the mud. More woe and grief, but those buying right now, or that bought before mid 2020, will probably not see a loss at all. Temporary losses. Not capital losses. It's ALWAYS a dip, when you are spread out and have lots of fingers in lots of pies. Watch the margin, it will bite you in the @$$. Trade with money, not wishes. If you had bought the same ETF when it was at $91 and never sold it, you know what? You are still a winner. It just doesn't look that way right now. You missed out on a year or two of profit. If it ruined you, then you are doing it all wrong.
Sure, if you are smarter than the market, close or reverse a position when it turns against you. But how do you know it won't just re-reverse as soon as you hit that BUY or SELL button, or leave your computer for a few hours? One thing is for certain though, and that is as long as civilization and money exist, markets will in the long trend keep going up. Trying to outsmart it will as often as not spank you like a redheaded stepchild.
