With the CAC 40 hovering near its historic highs in the spring of 2026 and American markets setting new records – despite the situation in the Middle East and the threat of inflation – many individual investors are asking themselves the same questions. Should we wait for a correction to enter? Is selling now to preserve your gains the solution? This temptation has a name, “market timing”. It consists of anticipating market movements to buy at the lowest and sell at the highest.
But while you “wait for the best moment”you do not invest. Maxime Kugler, head of the financial offering at Altaprofits, an online wealth management broker, is categorical on this: “The “right time” to invest is often an illusion : we only recognize it once it has passed” This is precisely where the problem lies. When the markets rise, those who had waited for the “good opportunity” find themselves at buy back even higher only when they hesitated.
The trap of “best” and “worst” days
The statistics are also overwhelming for those who try to “time” the market. According to a reference study by theFinancial Markets Authoritycarried out on a panel of 14,799 active clients in France, nearly 9 out of 10 individual traders lose on the Forex and CFD markets over four years, with an average loss of 10,900 euros per client. And even on more traditional equity markets, wanting to enter and exit at “good time” do lose a lot of yield to investors.
The explanation is mathematical. On the markets, performance is not spread out uniformly over time: it is concentrated on a few exceptional days. An often-cited JP Morgan study measured the performance of the S&P 500 between 2001 and 2020. An investor who remained invested over the entire period obtained an annualized performance of 7.47%. Anyone who missed the 10 best trading days over these 20 years falls to 3.35% per year: more than half as much. The one who missed the 60 best sessions? It would have lost money, with an annual performance of -6.81%.
DCA, the method that removes the question of timing
Taking the risk of missing these days means taking the risk of sabotaging your entire investment plan. And therein lies the trap: those best days come often at the worst psychological momentafter a decline, when individuals hesitate to cut losses. “The best and worst market days are often very close from each other. This is what makes market timing so dangerous: exiting the market to avoid declines is also take the risk of missing the rebounds »raises Maxime Kugler. The good news is that there is a not-so-complicated technique to avoid this trap: DCA.
To get around this problem, Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) is a very simple method: it consists of investing the same amount at regular intervals (every month, every quarter), no matter what the markets do. “Progressive investment makes it possible to smooth out entry points and reduce the risk of bad timing”confirms our expert. You don’t miss any of the famous best sessions. In addition to this, if the stock market rises, your payment allows you to buy fewer shares; if it goes down, you buy more. Everything ends up balancing out.
Setting up a DCA is very simple: on life insurance, the scheduled investment, which is triggered on the same date at regular intervals, is available everywhere. You can enable or disable it at any time. On securities or PEA accounts, it depends on your broker.
