Buying on the dips

[ScotHill]

I've heard people mention this and buying up some extra when the markets drop (like they did back in Jan/Feb) but could/should it be part of a regular investment strategy?

If you had (to make it worthwhile) £500 per month to put into funds, is it best just to put that much in regularly, or maybe put in £300 each month and save some back for any 'dippy' events?

I guess that would mean if you had a few months of constant rises you would miss out on those rises to the tune of £200 a month. But in the middle of month three you could get a 3-4% drop and buy in at that point with £600....

[ScotHill]

Thanks for all the viewpoints, all makes sense. I think I was thinking more of a long term holding of an index/fund that rises over the very long term, and unexpected shocks that cause it to fall (like in January), rather than forecasted valuations, monitoring company performance etc.

So if an index was 10,000 today and might be expected to be 30,000 in 20 years time (as an example) if it randomly dropped 5%+ in a couple of days that would be a good time to buy extra - the only drawback being that the money you had held back to buy the extra could have been increasing over the previous months, including generating dividends.

I started paying monthly into a company pension for a few years from October 2007, pretty much correlating with the extended fall in the stock market, which at the time made me think I was losing money, but when I look at the price of the fund now I realise that I was just buying at a discount.