Inner Contrarian

Everything moves in cycles, and it seems like the proverbial recession in US has arrived after a secular bull trend. My inner contrarian has revived the perennial need for me to think about retirement (at 35) - Buy now! buy! buy!

Ever since reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street, I have been using dollar cost averaging for my investments in index funds. Despite numerous studies that suggest that lump sum investing is statistically better than dollar cost averaging [Math professor article] [Journal of Financial Planning article], they appear to assume the obviously improbable - that you have the lump sum of money just waiting to be invested.

Alas no, I do not have a lump of gazillion dollars sitting alone in the corner and waiting to be utilized, but I do have regular income that I feel should be working as hard as I do (erm, maybe a little harder). But let's face it, with high confidence, I claim that I will not be as successful as Warren Buffet or David Swensen in achieving 15-20% returns on my investments over an extended period of time.

And until I can get my sentient uber AI investment software up and running, maybe I can consider modified dollar cost averaging as a means of investing.