Don't play the waiting game

If you’ve been “about to start” investing for the last few years, this one is for you.

The script is familiar.

• “Markets are at an all-time high. I’ll wait for a correction.”
• Correction comes. “Things look unstable. I’ll wait for clarity.”
• Markets recover. “Now I’ve missed the bus. Let me wait for the next fall.”

And just like that, five years go by in “research”.

You haven’t made a bad investment. You’ve done something worse: no investment.

The real problem: safe-sounding procrastination

We like to pretend we’re being cautious and “waiting for the right time”. In reality, we are afraid of starting just before a fall. We are trying to avoid regret. We think, with enough news and YouTube videos, we’ll find the perfect entry point.

Here’s the bad news: even professionals can’t reliably time the market.

Here’s the worst news: while you wait for perfection, time is quietly working against you.

Meet Investor A and Investor B

Let me introduce two imaginary but very real Indians.

• Investor A starts a SIP of Rs 10,000 per month today and keeps going for 25 years.
• Investor B is smarter than that. He waits 5 years for the “right time” and then starts the same Rs 10,000 SIP… but now he has only 20 years left.

Same monthly amount. Similar investment. Only difference: a 5-year delay.

You don’t need the exact numbers to get the point: A 5-year delay can cost you tens of lakh rupees. Not because A is smarter, luckier or better at stock-picking. Just because A started. At Value Research, when we run these numbers for ‘real’ people on ‘real’ data, this gap is often the most painful line in the whole report. It’s the cost of decisions you didn’t take.

Three investors walk into a market…

Now let’s complicate it just a bit. Imagine three friends with the same Rs 10,00,000 to invest for 25 years:

1. Investor A (Immediate): Invests the entire amount today, at whatever level the market is at.
2. Investor B (Lucky): Waits and invests only after a 20 per cent market decline. (This is the fantasy everyone is chasing.)
3. Investor C (Never): Is waiting for a “safer time” and stays in a savings account or FD for years.

Lucky may end up slightly ahead of Immediate, if everything lines up perfectly. But both are miles ahead of Never. The difference between “good timing” and “average timing” is small compared to the difference between starting vs not starting. Waiting for the perfect entry is like refusing to board a train because you wanted a window seat in coach B3.

The psychology behind all this

Two things are going on in our heads.

1. Regret aversion: You are more scared of investing today and seeing a fall next month than of not investing at all. The first regret is loud and visible; the second is silent and invisible.
2. Illusion of control: We believe that if we just consume enough market commentary, we’ll know what will happen next. We won’t. Neither do the commentators.

At Value Research, when we look at long-term portfolios, the winners are not the ones who found the perfect “entry”. They’re the ones who gave compounding more time to work.

So what should you actually do?

Let’s make this practical.

1. Separate “starting” from “optimising”: First priority: be invested. Fine-tuning can come later. Pick a simple, diversified equity fund or a mix of equity and debt suitable for your goals and risk appetite. Start a SIP that you can sustain comfortably. Is this the best fund in the world at the perfect time? Probably not. Is it better than five more years of “I’m thinking about it”? Absolutely.

2. Use phasing, not paralysis: If you have a lump sum and are scared of investing it all at once, don’t freeze. Put it into the market gradually over 6–12 months via STP/SIP. This way, you don’t bet everything on one day’s NAV, but you also don’t sit in cash forever.

At Value Research, we often suggest this middle path. It respects your fear without letting it completely control the outcome.

3. Automate the decision: Decisions made every month based on “how I feel about markets” will mostly favour laziness and fear. Instead, fix a rule. “I will invest X% of my income every month.” Run the SIP, then look at your portfolio once or twice a year, not once or twice a day.

The less drama you inject into the process, the better your results will be.

The bus you’re afraid of missing

Markets will always feel too high, too low, too risky, too uncertain—depending on what you read that morning.

The only time they feel “obviously safe” is when you’re looking at a chart from ten years ago, wishing you had started then. So here is the uncomfortable truth:

• The biggest risk for most people is not “I invested just before a crash.”
• The biggest risk is “I kept waiting for the perfect moment and never gave my money time to grow.”

You don’t need to be a market expert. You just need to stop using “timing” as a respectable word for procrastination.

Start small. Start simple. But start.

Also read: The futility of market timing