Many investors often wonder if there is an appropriate time to purchase stocks. This question ranks alongside many similar ones that imply that there is a method to determine if there is a “good” time to purchase stocks. I wrote about whether it was a good time to invest in the Singapore stock market earlier this week, so the question of when is the best time to buy stocks should also be addressed. The implicit assumption here is that investors can deduce an appropriate time to put their capital to work, thus avoiding the heartache of seeing their investments lose money temporarily.

Can you time the market?

The behaviour described above is akin to timing the market, which is described as buying stocks when prices are low and selling them when they go higher. Timing the market may sound like an attractive strategy, but it’s notoriously difficult to do consistently....