Investing: Wait For It...?

By Stacey Vanek Smith

Published February 21, 2019 at 2:41 PM CST

Whether you're new to investing, or if you've been investing for years, you are going to run into the question of whether or not you should 'time the market.' Timing the market essentially means guessing when is the best time you should put your money to work. Buy low, sell high, right? It sounds so obvious. But as Jill Schlesinger tells Stacey in this episode, falling for the temptation of trying to time the market is a fool's errand. Jill is the author of a new book: The Dumb Things Smart People Do With Their Money. She's also a former trader, who draws on her own experiences - and failures - to illustrate why market timing is a bad strategy.

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Economy & Business

Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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