Is it really that much better than the fund I bought? I could add another $5500 and get it because I haven't added any money yet for 2015

It's not 'wrong', you can do whatever you want with your money. I would confidently say that you (and pretty much everyone else) have no edge drastically changing your allocation based on your opinion of the risk/reward of the stock market right now. I think its very likely you're costing yourself a lot of long term equity if your going to do things like this, but the move could easily be profitable over the short term.

However, I would say its wrong for you to give other people advice suggesting they should try to time tops/bottoms based on their opinion of the market as well. Stop doing that.

Yes, its really that much better for your IRA funds. Theres nothing wrong with taking a flyer on VGSIX but it shouldn't be a huge chunk of your IRA.

Also remember your investment theory is 'house of cards financial system' so if you want your investments aligned with that, you should def sell and find better hedges.

I have gold and silver - but I want a more broader approach. No one wants the financial system to collapse because it would wreck havoc on most families.

Gold and silver won't help if the financial system collapses.

it will do better than paper

didn't see much use of gold in Mad Max. Seems like you'd want to stock up on munitions, fuel, sheep, women, and hairspray.

You are picking the 487th most effective hedge against financial meltdown because there is a 490th most effective hedge?!?

This. Toilet paper, canned goods and soap are also pretty good choices.

I see this advice all the time, so my plan is to simply stock up on the one thing people seem to always forget:

lol.

Just wanted to add that dumping all of your assets into the market at the same time carries a lot of risk. The way around this would be to go something like 1/3 now, 1/3 in 6 months, 1/3 in a year. You can keep the excess in something on the safer side while waiting. You can mess around with the time frames or %s or whatever, but dumping it all in at once is not ideal.

Why is this a bad idea?

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It's not a bad idea.

If you have excess cash right now - cash that you are confident that you won't need to access within the next 5 years that you're comfortable investing - it makes sense to invest that now. Holding excess cash right now knowing that you're going to invest it in 3 or 6 or 12 months is market timing. That may or may not turn out to be a good decision, but call it what it is - market timing.

No, it is absolutely not market timing. You aren't timing anything. You don't know if 6 months or a year from now will be a better or worse time to buy. By spreading out your purchases, you are placing bets on all 3 times and lessening the variance. Buying everything now is placing all your money on the bet that now is better than 6 months from now. It's not timing, it's anti-timing. Buying everything now is really unintentional market timing.

Spreading your purchases sacrifices some EV for risk reduction. The time frame used doesn't need to be as long as I'm proposing either though. Spreading purchases over a 6 month period is fine as well.

Of course it's market timing. You have cash on hand now and you're intentionally choosing to invest in a ~0% savings account for the next 3 or 6 or 12 months. That's a bet that prices will decline over that time period. You are intentionally choosing to have an asset allocation now that's different from your goal.

The reason that people have historically advocated dollar cost averaging is not because it's a good idea when you have an existing sum of cash, but rather because it tends to coincide with people's cash flows. People get paid once a month or once a week or whatever, and then the advice is to invest that excess cash from each paycheck as soon as you get it.

If you want to sacrifice EV for risk reduction, pick an asset allocation that isn't 100% equity.

Just to add, here's Vanguard's study:
https://pressroom.vanguard.com/nonin..._Averaging.pdf

If DCA makes sense, do you take your lump sum retirement accounts and liquidate them at the beginning of each year so that you can DCA back into the investments over the year? If not, why not? If you inherited a large dollar amount of stock, rather than cash, would you immediately liquidate the stock, and then DCA back into it over the course of the year?

Presuming that he will continue to put money towards retirement, he already is effectively dollar cost averaging his life roll.

It looks like you understand the concept pretty well, but still don't understand why it's bad. If your overall investment time frame is long (e.g, 30 yrs) the benefits of variance reduction are mitigated almost to the point that they don't matter. The EV benefits are attenuated also, but not to as great an extent.

That's why studies like the linked vanguard one have the results they do. If you want the most money in the long run, lump sum beats DCA. DCA is for people who play pocket aces correctly, lose a big pot, and then feel bad they did it (apologies for the poker analogy).

This is mostly a semantic argument, but I disagree. The presumption of DCA is that you could lump sum, but you chose not to, otherwise the distinction has no meaning. If he is putting the savings in as quickly as he can (as soon as he gets paid), then he is really lump summing. If he gets paid, has money to invest, but keeps it in cash to defer for later investment then he is DCAing.

So since he doesn't have his life roll all at once, I'd say putting it in every year as soon as he can is just lump summing to the best of his ability and not really DCAing. Of course once you understand the principles, the semantics are of little consequence.

The principle is that he has absolutely no need to DCA. There is no value for him to do so.

A case could be made if he was investing his life roll.

Correct

I guess. Depends on what you mean by life roll though. We can always construct scenarios to make a generally less desirable option a better one in a specific case.

Any opinions on trying to time based on historic PE ratios or length of bull market?

Historic S&P 500 PE ratios.
http://www.multpl.com/
http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/

Here's an article from over a year ago. It says we're currently in about the 3rd longest bull run in history.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/inve...ars/index.html

Don't.

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