Whether it's averaging down or buying for the first time, it comes down to whether you pick the long-term value right. To say that averaging down doesn't work most of the time is the same as saying that most of the time a stock that's going down will keep going down. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't. At any given moment all known factors are taken into account by the market, so, in theory, where a stock has been shouldn't be a clue to where it's heading next.
