We are seeing some procrastination to invest in the current environment.

A few prospective investors are sitting on their hands hoping it will be a better time to invest sometime in the future.

“Too uncertain to invest in this climate. Once Trump has completed his term, that will be the time to invest”.

I can see what they are getting at but this is the classic ‘market timing’ trap.

Too much uncertainty in the middle east? My daughter asked me in the weekend if we were going to have WWIII. 

We hear the argument and understand the feelings. We acknowledge the problem. 

Conventional wisdom

After years of listening to different theories about when to invest and trying different things, we conclude that the time to invest is when you have the funds available.

If we take feelings about the environment into account or get caught up in guesswork, we usually come unstuck. Sure, we might get lucky, but the problem with luck is we think luck is skill and we start thinking we must be cleverer than everyone else. That is a very slippery slope.

Here are some thoughts on market timing worth considering -

• Can we be certain that investments will be cheaper next year, or after Trump has left the stage? What if they are more expensive. Will we have wasted our time and our money? 
• How can we be sure that an elected US President will create poor investment markets? We can’t be sure, and there is the answer to our question. We can never know what is going to happen in politics, nor in investment markets. We think we can see what is going to happen. We can see a trend. We see the cause and the effect, as night follows day. We act on it, and mostly we are wrong because the future is random and unpredictable. 
• There will aways be uncertainty. There always has been, and there always will be. It won’t necessarily be better after Trump, no matter what you think of him. 
• History shows that the greatest gains are to be made during periods of heightened uncertainty. “Be fearful when others are greedy; be greedy when others are fearful.” In other words, when everything is rosy, that is the time of highest danger, and when everything is most uncertain and looks dangerous, that is the time of most potential gain.  Consider the American share market on ‘Liberation Day’, 2 April 2025, Trump announced his ‘reciprocal tariffs’. The market bottomed on 8 April. The environment was total confusion. It was a nightmare. Since then that same market is up 20% as at 17 June 2025. 
• It is much easier to not invest and to hold onto your cash. Might that work? How will you know the right time to invest? There won’t be an official with a green light going “Now is the time to invest”. We find that some people sometimes wait years to invest, and they have always lost money. While you have been in cash waiting, after tax and inflation, your wealth will have been going backwards. That is for certain. A guaranteed loss! 
• In our experience it is never obviously a good time to invest, that is, a time so obvious that no one would miss it. 
• Too many otherwise sensible people treat investing like it was a guessing game rather than a game of diversification based on the science of data analysis. 
• Diversification, together with avoiding market timing are the two great investing lessons of the past 50 years. Just as we can’t predict the bad things that happen in the future, neither can we predict the good things that happen. We know they will happen, but we don’t know when. 
• The choice to not invest is the easy one. The decision to invest is the harder one, because of the commitment involved. You get paid to take the commitment, not to sit on the sidelines. If you sit on the sidelines you pay others to take the risk for you while you go backwards.
• It pays to remind yourself of what you are actually investing in. Investing in an internationally diversified investment portfolio is an investment in business on a worldwide scale. The diversity is huge. The potential is unlimited. The scale is enormous. 
• Business will always bounce back from a knock. 8 billion people getting up every morning to go better themselves, feed their families, sort our problems, succeed, fail, succeed. Doggedly improve the condition of themselves, their families, and the planet.  
• It has very little to do with Trump, even if we knew how he was going to turn out in the end. It is all about a belief in the power of people to better themselves and others in the process. 

When your investment horizon is decades, not months, there is no better time to invest than today. 

Keep asking great questions ...