I agree with almost everything in this post... except for the first paragraph. I am not sure what you mean exactly with "time the market". I do not know anything about short-term market timing, but I think that long-term market timing can work very well.
With long-term market timing I mean to buy and hold index funds when the long-term trend is "up" and to sell when the long-term trend turns "down". This long-term trend only changes direction on average once per 2 or 3 years. Thus, yes, this works, but only for long-term investors.
Cost-averaging works even better when you take this long-term trend into account.
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