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Using Wealthfront to time the market

Wealthfront is not designed for market timing — it’s designed for long-term investing. If you try to time the markets by using existing Wealthfront features, you will likely be disappointed with the results. 

Wealthfront does not provide for market timing for good reason. Several empirical studies have tried to measure the cost of bad market timing decisions. They all agree that investors that try to time the market tend to do much worse than a buy-and-hold investor who avoided market timing altogether. A recent DALBAR study observed the average equity mutual fund investor underperformed the S&P 500 by 4.92% on an annualized basis during the 30-year period 1998-2019 due to consistently buying after the market has risen and selling when the market declines (DALBAR, 2020). In short, attempting the time to market can prove extremely costly. 

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