Leading indicators of an economic contraction, page-236

"I sense that the notion of holding cash lulls investors into a false sense of security. The reason I believe this is because I have often seen/read about/spoken to investors who went to cash because they were "concerned" about markets at some stage, or felt that the market was "due for a correction", only to at some stage later end up buying back in again at higher levels. Timing the market is a mug's game."

I agree with you that timing the "market" during the expansion phase of the credit cycle is ultimately unproductive. This is where an investor should be focused on recycling their capital through the value machine you have mastered and beautifully described in this thread.

However, I still feel Howard Marks, Ray Dalio and Ken Fisher may be worth listening too. I feel they too have mastered the value machine, in addition to mastering a deep understaning of the short term and long term credit cycles. I have the sense that in the last 10% of the short term credit cycle, their focus slowly shifts from the value machine ( where they have extracted every last drop out of the expansionary phase), to the cycle machine where they aim to preserve capital and in some cases extract as much as possible out of the short contractionary phase, in ultimate preperation for commencement of the next expansionary phase where they switch their value machine back on to full power.

So, in my opinion, the general statement "timing the market is a mugs game" is an over simplification.

Maybe it should be something like "timing the market is a mugs game until the market calls time"