Chapter 07 The Logic of Market Entry

Right Now Is the Best Time to Enter the Market

Risk disclosure: The market-entry timing described in this chapter (buy whenever you have money), the market returns during war years, and so on, are all instructional illustrations drawn from public historical data, and do not constitute individual buy or sell advice.

In the investment markets, countless people toil away in search of the so-called “best buying point” and the perfect “moment to escape the top.” Yet from the macro perspective of the history of capitalist development, trying to predict the market’s highs and lows is often a fruitless game. Currency is like water, and assets are like boats. When the water rises (fiat currency depreciates), the boat is naturally lifted along with it. Only by letting go of the obsession with short-term volatility and understanding the underlying logic of “a rising tide lifts all boats” can you truly board the train of wealth growth.

Right Now Is the Best Time to Enter the Market

Many investors, when facing a market that keeps setting new highs, always develop the worry that they are “buying too expensive,” and so hesitate and dare not enter. In truth, driven by the continuous progress of humanity and by inflation, the long-term trend of the market has always been upward. Relative to the coming decades, every “historical high” of today will eventually become an insignificant point halfway up the mountain on the chart.

You all say the market is at a high now and you should hurry and run. Let me tell you, right now is the low! What was the high in February? 488. And now? 574. So was 488 high? Looking back now, of course it does not seem high. Right, it is always low. The market is always at a low point. Do you all understand what I mean when I say the market is always at a low point. In the future QQQ will be 50,000 and 00662 will be 10,000, and right now it is only a few hundred, so why would you complain that it is expensive? Hurry up and buy! (Video 00526)

Looking back over the past development of the index, investors who always hesitate because they feel the level is too high will often only watch helplessly as asset prices climb ever higher. This trend of endlessly breaking through the sky proves that, from the perspective of long-term investing, the best time to enter the market is always “now.”

When you hold investable funds, the most rational decision is to buy quality index assets immediately at market price. Investing is like leaving home every morning to catch the bus to work: along the way you may run into a traffic jam or a small hiccup (volatility), but you would never doubt that you will reach your destination. Any attempt to wait for the market to fall back not only adds psychological stress, but may also cause you to miss the market’s most crucial upswing. The essence of investing is to place your funds into a system that trends upward over the long run, not to gamble on short-term price fluctuations.

My buying and selling are all done in a single lump sum, bought at market price, and that is that. There is no so-called buying in batches, and no target pricing. The principle for buying is simply to buy whatever you can get, and the principle for selling is simply to sell whatever you can sell. (Video 00494)

Many retail investors are in the habit of placing limit orders, haggling over a difference of a few cents, and as a result often miss the timing to enter. Buying and selling at market price is not about “not caring about cost,” but about “not staking your time for the sake of a few cents.” From the perspective of long-term compounding, the gap between the current stock price and the price ten years from now is dozens of times over, and those who agonize over a fraction of a percent of the entry-price difference often end up being the ones who miss the entire move and are forced to buy back in at a higher level.

Retail investors most commonly suffer from the psychological ailment of being so frightened at the sight of the index setting an “all-time high (ATH)” that they dare not buy, or even want to clear out their holdings to wait for a pullback. Yet according to market statistics from J.P. Morgan / Chase and others, the subsequent returns after U.S. stocks set new historical highs are not necessarily worse. Judging by the long-term history of the S&P 500, the average return one year after entering at a historical high shows no clear gap compared with entering on any non-high day. Setting a new high in itself is not a reason to leave the market or wait for a pullback. A new high usually represents strong corporate earnings and a “continuation of momentum” in a macro expansion, not the endpoint of a bubble. The bottom of the capital market will keep being propped ever higher as the productivity of human civilization rises, and viewed on a 20-year scale, every historical high is nothing more than an insignificant point halfway up the mountain. Destiny is decided by cognition, not by the price level.

In other words, the probability of an obvious pullback occurring after a new high is far lower than a retail investor’s intuition suggests. Retail investors imagine that “waiting for a pullback to enter” will get them a bargain, but historical data shows this waiting is almost always futile: in the overwhelming majority of cases, what they wait for is the regret of “another 10% or 20% rise.”

To feel the argument that “it is never too expensive” more intuitively, look at the future worth of each share of 00662. Projecting at a 12% annualized return, a single share at 89.5 dollars today will reach 278 dollars in 10 years, 863 dollars in 20 years, and as high as 2,681 dollars in 30 years; and by the time you have worked 40 years and are ready to retire, the price of that one share will reach 8,328 dollars, equal to about NT$8.33 million per lot (Note: in Taiwan one lot equals 1,000 shares). Once you clearly foresee this endgame, will you still agonize and hesitate in front of the screen over whether it is 89 dollars or 90 dollars right now? Every so-called “historical high” you worry about is, when placed on a 40-year coordinate system, merely an insignificant point halfway up the mountain. Stop waiting for the so-called pullback: any time to enter is the right time.

Overcoming the Fear of Buying and Refusing to Wait Idly for a Pullback

“Waiting for a pullback to buy” is one of the psychological traps retail investors most easily fall into. In a long-term bull market, if the market shows a pattern of continuous rises, then waiting idly on the sidelines for that minuscule drop will ultimately cost an opportunity cost far greater than the risk of buying in directly. This indecision is precisely the biggest reason investors miss out on the compounding effect.

There is a highly representative comparison chart of “red dots vs. blue dots.” The red dots represent the “buy whenever you have money” type of investor: whenever there are investable funds, they buy in immediately, no matter where the market sits. The blue dots represent the “wait for the low point” type of investor: every time, they buy precisely at the market’s pullback low. By intuition, almost everyone would assume the blue dots perform better, but the fact revealed by long-term backtesting is exactly the opposite. The reason is hidden in a market probability that most people overlook: according to the long-term historical statistics of U.S. stocks, the market spends about 70% of the time in an upward trend, and only 30% of the time consolidating or falling. When the “wait for the low point” investor leaves funds idle off the field, what those funds miss is precisely that 70% of upside; and even if they occasionally catch a low point in the 30% of downside, the price difference saved can almost never make up for the entire stretch of compounding missed. The 70/30 time distribution is what determines the iron law that “being in the market beats timing the market”: the reason the red dots win is not that they are clever, but that they are always on board the train.

▲ Figure 7-1a The market-entry timing of red dots vs. blue dots, where red dots buy whenever they have money while blue dots wait only for pullback lows

▲ Figure 7-1b The long-term cumulative result, where the red dots (entering every month) come out ahead while the blue dots (waiting for lows) fall behind instead

This slope of “trending upward over the long run” becomes even clearer when viewed against the year-by-year returns. Of the 40 annual periods of the NASDAQ-100 since 1986, 33 years closed in the green with a rise, and only 7 years fell. Down years are a rare minority that appears only occasionally, a few times out of a hundred. To bet that a given year will fall and wait idly on the sidelines is to place yourself, from the very start, on the side of that 17% minority in the wager.

▲ Figure 7-1c The year-by-year returns of the NASDAQ-100 (1986–2025), where down years are a rare minority seen only occasionally out of a hundred

Data through Q3 2025 (2025 is year-to-date, denominated in U.S. dollars)

A more direct local piece of empirical evidence comes from the real price action of QQQ in 2023. From January to June of 2023, QQQ set a new high almost every month, and for three or four consecutive months there was not a single day whose close was lower than the day before. Many investors kept waiting for a pullback during this stretch, thinking “after rising so much, it will surely correct.” In October the market finally saw a wave of correction, and many people excitedly thought “the low point has finally come” and were finally ready to enter. But by comparison, the buying price after the October correction turned out to be higher than the price on any random day between January and June. Those who “felt it was too high and waited a bit” missed half a year of gains for nothing, and in the end bought at a price even more expensive than those who “kept investing steadily.”

The cruel part of this case is that even when “waiting for a pullback” really did happen, the price after the pullback was still far higher than any buying point that had been dismissed as “too expensive” half a year earlier. The market’s long-term upward slope keeps propping up every “relative low,” causing the market timer to forever chase a shadow that runs farther and farther away. Apply the 2023 scenario to any bull-market year, and the conclusion is almost identical: those who “keep investing steadily” beat those who “wait to buy on a pullback.”

Quantitative research gives the cruelest truth about “buying the dip.” Referring to the quantitative research in Nick Maggiulli’s “Even God Couldn’t Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging” and in “Just Keep Buying,” even if you possessed a “God’s-eye view” to predict precisely and buy at the absolute lowest point, the highest probability of buying the dip beating steady buying would be only 30%. But as soon as you miss the absolute bottom by as much as two months, this win rate immediately collapses from 30% to 3%. In other words, the ordinary investor cannot even get the “God’s-eye 30%”; the win rate available to them is only 3%. The retail investor who holds cash all day waiting to buy the dip is essentially trading a “wager that will lose 97% of the time” for the “small comfort of a 3% chance of winning,” a gambling table that no rational risk assessment should ever accept. Historical backtesting further shows that, testing across rolling 40-year periods over the past century of U.S. stocks, even with a perfect God’s-eye view, the buy-the-dip strategy still lags behind the mindless input of “just keep buying” more than 70% of the time.

Whenever the market rises, there will always be academic experts who pull out the “Shiller P/E (CAPE)” to warn that the market is overheated, and who invoke “mean reversion” to persuade people to trim positions at highs. This is the most dangerous academic blind spot in the age of AI and the cloud. What CAPE divides by is the “average earnings of the past 10 years”; using the profit levels of an old era that sold physical software to measure today’s AI computing power and cloud giants with zero marginal cost is bound to produce the mistaken conclusion of “severe overvaluation.” The so-called “mean” will be forcibly propped up as technology advances, and using an outdated model to predict the endgame of the tech empire will only make people perfectly miss the primary upleg of wealth, time and again.

When you buy a broad-market index, you cannot have your own opinions. The moment you start thinking there will be a lower point before you buy, you will never be able to pull the trigger. (Video 00479)

Attempting to dodge major market declines by trading in and out will often make an investor pay a painful price.

The data shows that if, over an investment period as long as twenty years, you merely missed the market’s 10 best-performing days, the annualized return would plunge sharply from the original 9.8% all the way down to 6.1%; and if you missed the 30 best-performing days, the final investment return would even be worse than leaving the money in a bank fixed deposit. (Video 00486)

Converted into more intuitive multiples of wealth:

(The wealth multiples above are converted using this book’s long-term standard of a 12% annualized return for QQQ, giving about 17-fold over 25 years. The 9.8% cited in Video 00486 above is historical statistics for a different index and period; the baseline differs and it cannot be directly compared with these multiples.)

Historical data reveals the price of fear. In the face of extreme turmoil such as war:

The market’s big up-days often occur at the most panicked moments, and to leave the market or wait in fear is to bet against the compounding time of the future. Rather than pursuing a single beautiful buy, it is better to pursue holding for long enough over the long run.

The “Ironclad Proof” That Lump-Sum Investing Beats Dollar-Cost Averaging

In real investing practice, should you invest in a lump sum or dollar-cost average? The data gives the most objective answer. Running a rigorous backtest on the roughly 25.81 years of historical data for the NASDAQ-100 (represented by QQQ) since its listing (March 1999 to December 2024), the results show that across the various best- and worst-case scenarios, the performance of “lump-sum investing” comprehensively crushes the other strategies.

Converted into more intuitive absolute amounts: if the total investment is US$300,000, the total assets 25 years after a lump-sum investment reach as high as about US$2.67 million, while the final assets of dollar-cost averaging come to about US$2.14 million, a gap between the two of as much as US$530,000 (about NT$17.25 million). The backtested probabilities further show that lump-sum investing has a 90% chance of coming out ahead. Therefore, for the salaried class, the sole and best strategy is to “buy whenever you have money,” investing directly at market price the day after payday, letting the funds participate in the market’s compounding as early as possible.

A localized retrospective over the past 20 years likewise confirms this iron law. Using a retrospective on the NASDAQ-100 index (00662 was only established in 2016, so here the index’s price action is used for the conversion, with 00662 as the corresponding tool in Taiwan today): starting in January 2006, investing a fixed NT$20,000 each month and sticking with it until August 2024 (more than 18 years in total), the total principal invested was NT$4.46 million, and the account finally accumulated to about NT$16.6 million, a rather good result. But compared with another investor assumed to have “invested a lump sum of NT$3.9 million at the start of 2006” (the equivalent funds after discounting the NT$4.46 million of principal at a 1.5% discount rate) and then not touched it at all for 18 years, the account finally accumulated to about NT$21.9 million. Over the same span of time and with equivalent funding conditions, lump-sum investing earned a full NT$5 million more than dollar-cost averaging.

This NT$5 million is not luck, but the mathematical inevitability of “funds entering earlier to consume the entire stretch of compounding.” Even over an 18-year span baptized by multiple major declines such as the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, the COVID crash, and the 2022 rate-hike bear market, lump-sum investing still comprehensively beat dollar-cost averaging by a margin of five million, proving that the market-timing mindset of “waiting for the best moment” holds no ground, whether on QQQ or on 00662.

More intuitive backtesting data reveals that timing does not matter at all, and that whether you can keep investing steadily is what is key. Take the classic S&P 500 market-timing study published by Peter Lynch in 1995, spanning 30 years (1965–1995, investing US$2,000 at the start of each year), and compare several types of investors: the highest annualized return, from “precisely buying at the lowest point each year,” is about 11.7%; “mindlessly investing a lump sum at the start of each year” is 11.0%; “dollar-cost averaging” is 10.8%; and even “precisely buying at the highest point each year” still comes to 10.6%, an annualized gap of less than 1%. Meanwhile, the person who chose to “forever leave it in a fixed deposit and never enter the market” ends up, 30 years later, with an annualized return far below 5%, unable even to outrun inflation. The gap between the most precise market timer and the unluckiest market timer is minuscule, and both far surpass the bystander who forever stays off the field. This is the ironclad mathematical proof that market timing is futile.

▲ Figure 7-2 Market timing is almost futile; whether you can stay in the market steadily is what is key (Peter Lynch's 1965–1995 S&P 500 study)

I know the market will surely have corrections, but I am not a god; I will not know when the market will correct, so do not ask about market corrections. Asking is asking in vain. Our channel has only one strategy: whenever you have money is the time to buy. (Video 00162)

For investors who truly cannot overcome the psychological barrier and insist on buying in batches, Teacher James gives one final red line: “If you buy in batches, keep it within three months to finish buying as much as possible.” Three months is not a rule of thumb, but a mandatory maximum time limit. Beyond three months, the opportunity cost of idle cash will begin to severely erode the compounding that should have belonged to you. It is better to grit your teeth and finish buying it all within three months than to fall into the procrastination trap of “waiting indefinitely for a better moment.”

Behind this strategy lies a deeply illuminating underlying idea: a personal loan is “converting the next 10 years of human capital, in advance, into today’s financial capital.” Rather than dollar-cost averaging NT$10,000 a month and accumulating slowly, it is better to borrow a 10-year, NT$1.2 million personal loan and invest it in a lump sum, turning the original monthly investment of NT$10,000 into the principal-and-interest repayment to the bank (the monthly payment after interest will be slightly higher than NT$10,000, with the actual figure depending on the interest rate and repayment method). At a nearly identical monthly cash flow, the leverage of time is opened up in an instant. The premise is that you have a stable salary able to repay the principal and interest on time, and that you have no plan to buy a home and apply for a mortgage within the next 5 to 10 years (a personal loan will eat into your mortgage limit).

Turning each month’s dollar-cost averaging into borrowing a low-interest personal loan today, investing it early in a lump sum, and then repaying the principal and interest out of your monthly salary — an identical cash-flow outlay, yet earning an extra excess dividend because the principal is in place earlier — is precisely the brute-force display of “using debt to buy time.”

Many people think that with little principal there is no hope; use the compounding curve to puncture this myth. Suppose a lump sum of NT$500,000 is invested in 00662 (12% annualized); assets will break through NT$100 million after 47 years. If the principal is as high as NT$3 million, the time to break NT$100 million is 31 years. The initial principal was magnified 6-fold, yet in the face of powerful compounding it only saved 16 years of time! The weight of time is far greater than that of initial principal, and whether you have NT$500,000 or NT$3 million in hand, the earlier you invest in a lump sum, the earlier you can cross the chasm of class.

▲ Figure 7-3 The weight of time far outstrips that of principal, where a lump-sum investment in 00662 (12% annualized) with a 6-fold difference in principal saves only 16 years to reach NT$100 million

This set of numbers can also, from another angle, thoroughly shatter the fantasy of “market timing.” Under the same conditions of 25 years and US$1,000 invested each month, compare three extreme fates: the “unlucky soul” who precisely buys the highest point each month ends with about US$1.97 million, the “lucky one” who precisely buys the lowest point each month with about US$2.21 million, and the person who invests a lump sum whenever they have money with about US$2.35 million, the highest of all instead.

▲ Figure 7-4 A showdown of 25-year market-timing skill, where luck differs wildly yet the outcome gap is under 10%, and lump-sum investing comes out highest instead

Even with god-like powers of foresight, over 25 years the annualized return is only 0.26% higher than that of the unluckiest person. More surprising still: the lump-sum investing of “buy whenever you have money, never time the market” instead crushes even the “lucky one” whom the gods themselves would envy. There is only one conclusion: do not watch the screen, do not wait for a pullback, and buy whenever you have money.

To condense all of the above logic into the shortest possible execution mantra, it is what Teacher James repeatedly emphasizes: “Monday, buy immediately at market price.”

When you need to switch positions in your operations, you absolutely must sell immediately at market price and buy immediately at market price, finishing the switch within one second; even a brief departure from the market is a kind of risk. (Video 00290)

This slogan targets the two most stubborn weaknesses of human nature: the fantasy of market timing, and being taken over by emotion after watching the screen. “Monday” represents “the first trading day of the week is the earliest point of execution”; do not wait for next week, do not wait for next month, do not wait for a so-called “better moment.” “Immediately” represents “once you have thought clearly about the target you want to buy, act that same day, without rehearsing it one more time in your mind.” And “buy at market price” strictly forbids placing a limit order in an attempt to earn a few cents of price difference; the market may pull away in the very second you place your limit order and wait, and a limit order that fails to fill will force the investor to keep waiting next week and the week after, ultimately turning them into a forever off-the-field bystander.

The reason this mantra must be executed directly “without watching the screen” is that the moment you open the stock price before placing the order, your brain’s rationality will be taken over by emotion: seeing a big rise, you will hesitate, “am I chasing the high?”; seeing a big drop, you will fear, “will it keep falling?” Not looking at the price at all, mindlessly buying at market price, and going to sleep after buying is the only way to protect yourself from being disturbed by emotion.

The significance of the Monday mantra lies precisely here: as mentioned earlier, “missing the 10 best days” will cut your return in half, and those “10 best days” for the most part appear during the rebound after a crash, exactly when retail investors are most fearful and least dare to enter. The Monday mantra is about forcing yourself to “already be on board the train at any moment.”

The “Monday, immediately at market price” mantra is also the concrete action command for executing the “broken elevator” switching-cars tactic: at the Monday open, sell all the wrong individual stocks, insurance policies, and toxic assets at market price, and the moment you have the cash, immediately buy QQQ / 00662 at market price. Do not agonize over whether the selling price is too low or the buying price is too high; all this agonizing will drag the car-switching action out to next week, next month, and then forever unexecuted. Sell immediately at market price, buy immediately at market price, and your elevator is switched; from that moment on, your assets return to the stable upward track of growth.

If you have a large sum of funds in hand but your psychological makeup truly cannot bear the pressure of “investing it all in a single lump sum,” CLEC also offers a compromise solution: split the funds into small lump sums over 3 to 6 months, or even 10 weeks, but still maintain discipline: “for the next 10 consecutive Mondays, regardless of whether the market rises or falls, invest the same fixed amount at market price.” In terms of mathematical expected value, this is inferior to a true lump-sum investment, but it can ease the psychological pressure, ensure that the funds ultimately all enter the market in full, and avoid staying off the field forever out of fear. Note that this is still an extension of the spirit of “Monday, immediately at market price,” and not a return to the old market-timing road of “waiting for a pullback, waiting for a better moment.”

The Taboos During a Decline and the Precise Definition of “Buy Whenever You Have Money”

When the market falls sharply, “buy whenever you have money” is most easily misread as “deploy every bit of available cash to add to your position,” and this is an extremely dangerous drift. One repeatedly emphasized taboo is: during a decline you absolutely must not divert the 00865B (a cash-like position) originally allocated for the year-end rebalancing, nor may you use your emergency reserve fund to add to your stock positions. Once you have bought up your entire cash position, your asset allocation will be in complete disarray by year-end; and once your emergency reserve fund is eaten up, you will have no room to maneuver when you run into unemployment or a major expense.

The precise definition of “buy whenever you have money” is actually just two things. The first is newly generated cash flow, such as your monthly salary, year-end bonus, or dividends. The second is an already-planned loan facility, such as a personal loan or a wealth-management mortgage (a Taiwan revolving/home-equity mortgage; the repayment must come from work salary, and may not rely on dividends or selling stock). As long as these two kinds of “newly added funds” come in, buy directly at market price no matter where the market sits. Conversely, if you deliberately keep already-allocated cash on hand to wait to buy on a decline, this is not called “buy whenever you have money”; it is merely disguising market timing as discipline.

At the mindset level it is even more crucial: the index market trends upward over the long run, and any drawdown is short-term noise. A major market decline is equivalent to an opportunity to accumulate assets at a lower cost than usual, and you should feel happy and hold firmly. A decline is not a signal of fear, but the best time to execute discipline; just remember that the bullets for adding to your position must always come from new cash flow or an already-planned loan, and not from cash and reserves that were already allocated.

Avoiding the Capital Trap of Fixed-Share Investing

When discussing entry strategy, we must specifically clarify one highly destructive operational myth: “fixed-share investing.” Some brokerage platforms offer a function to buy a “fixed number of shares” each month, and in an asset that trends upward over the long run this is a capital disaster. As the QQQ share price keeps doubling upward over 25 years, if you insist on “fixed-share investing,” the funds an investor needs to prepare each month will grow ever more enormous. This not only makes it hard for the ordinary person to bear, but more fatally, it completely loses the core advantage of dollar-cost averaging, namely “adding more on dips and averaging down the unit cost.” In the same 25-year backtest, the annualized return of dollar-cost averaging can reach 8.58%, with a total profit and loss of about US$2.15 million, but the annualized return of fixed-share investing plunges miserably to about 5.67%, with a total profit and loss of only about US$980,000, a gap in total return between the two of as much as about US$1.12 million. (Chengfeng Linghang, “EP03-03 The Simplest Investing Method V2.7”)

Beyond the cash-flow trap of fixed-share investing, traditional “dollar-cost averaging” itself also conceals one fatal flaw: it is “light at the head and heavy at the feet.” The principal invested at age 25 is extremely small, so even if the market is cut in half by 50% it is painless; but when the investor has accumulated NT$20 million at age 55 in preparation for retirement, a single 30% pullback will instantly evaporate NT$6 million. This amounts to betting the entire fate of whether you can retire smoothly on whether you will run into a super typhoon in the final few years before completion. This is not called diversifying risk at all; it is concentrating risk to the extreme in the old age when you can least afford to lose. The real solution is to use “lifecycle investing,” moderately applying leverage to raise your exposure while you are young and your human capital is strongest, so as to thoroughly smooth out the risk of a lifetime across the dimension of time.

▲ Figure 7-5 A 25.81-year backtest of QQQ's three major entry strategies (1999/03–2024/12), where fixed-share investing, unable to average down its unit cost, is soundly beaten by lump-sum and dollar-cost averaging (Chengfeng Linghang EP03-03)

Facing Extreme Drawdowns Requires a Winner’s Courage

We must acknowledge that although QQQ (00662) is the strongest spear for creating wealth, historical backtesting also presents one cold fact: when an extreme bubble bursts, it has suffered a fatal drawdown of as much as -83%. For the investor who pursues the ultimate return, this is an extremely high psychological threshold. If you simply make a mindless single bet, then once you run into an epic stock-market crash like the one in 2000, even though over the long run you can eventually recover, the overwhelming majority of people will be forced to leave the market midway due to a break in their funding chain or a psychological collapse.

Any investment must be able to be held for the super long term before it can be called investing. What is the super long term? Refusing to sell even if it kills you is the super long term. (Video 00476)

This is why a set of “steel defensive lines” is needed to master this strongest spear. Buying quality assets alone is not enough; the investor also needs, through a precise asset allocation and rebalancing system, to hedge the volatility brought by this high-explosive-power asset. How should this strongest spear be sheathed in its scabbard? Only by building a system able to ignore market noise can you still sleep soundly in the face of extreme drawdowns, and truly achieve a leap of wealth across class.

To sum up, the operating laws of the capital market have already clearly revealed one fact: market-timing operations and predicting the highs and lows not only lack any scientific basis, but are also the greatest stumbling block obstructing wealth growth. Only by recognizing the cruel reality of fiat-currency depreciation and inflation, bravely crossing over fear to enter the market immediately, and treating quality assets as long-term weapons of both defense and offense, can an investor truly laugh last in this marathon of wealth accumulation.