Hello, novice Canadian investor here.
I just learned about passive investing through buying and holding ETFs in the long term. I had about $125K to invest (41K of which was immediately available)
Back in early June, I lump sum invested 41K (was under the wrong impression that dividends worked like savings interest rates which are calculated daily so I wanted to get into the market ASAP). I buy a diversified portfolio of ETFs : VCN, VUN, XEF, XEC.
In late June, the market went down quite a bit and I was down $2000. I read that I should have done dollar cost averaging to minimise chances of loss. I do that for the next couple weeks, investing about $5000 a week. Around this time, I read that lump sum investing is actually the way to go since markets trend upwards more often than it drops.
I saw that like 2 weeks ago, the market started going up again the whole week so I just lump sum invested the remainder.
Now it looks like the market is down again, maybe due to the north Korea thing and the Barcelona terrorist attack. I'm currently down maybe $3800. I'm definitely not gonna sell as I know I am in it for the long haul and that it will recover eventually, and I still have enough to cover daily expenses. But still I am bummed that I could have bought more shares at a lower price.
I guess maybe I am fishing for either reassurance that I didn't do anything wrong and it was just crappy timing (twice) or if there was something I should have done differently.
Thanks.
Submitted August 18, 2017 at 02:05PM by ChoirBoy1 http://ift.tt/2wYffPw
