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Not peddling, just offering insight from someone who has experience in this field. Sure no one can time the market, but they can use techniques to assist in their decision making. If you're an American, the number isn't 10%. 32% of Americans have a 401k. So 32% are investing and a solid portion let their 401k management bank make decisions for them/go by the typical advice given, by bank reps, of "aggressive portfolio when you're young" (majority stocks), "moderate when you reach middle age" (mix of stocks and treasury bonds), "conservative when you're older" (mostly treasury bonds). If you're younger and signs are pointing to the market crashing within a year or two, your management bank is going to advise on this and tell investors to move their money to cash (if there's even a cash option) or to treasury bonds. No, it's up to the investor to make a decision based on their own research/reading of the signs. Hell, these banks even use dark patterns to make it more difficult for investors to manually control their own portfolio, leading to users giving up on finding or thinking that they can't manage their portfolio and leave it up to the banks to do so. There are signs for when things aren't going so well and things are going to take a turn for the worst soon. Certain indicators can help with gauging this. No where near being 100% accurate, maybe 52% accurate, but that's still an edge. On top of certain indicators, monitoring quarterly GDP, yield curve rates, unemployment rates, home owners rates, among other stats, help to show what lies ahead. If one can get out some months before a crash, then great, it's likely that they didn't get out at the peak of the market cycle, but at least they likely saved their 401k from a 20% drop. And in the case that they did move to a cash option at the peak, then they likely saved themselves from a loss of between 40%-60%. If cash isn't an option, then likely saved around a 35-40% loss. Investing blindly isn't a good strategy no matter how one looks at it, but learning what to look and monitoring periodically can help in preventing catastrophic losses |
https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm
If you can actually derive meaningful excess returns from market timing that's great for you. I suggest a career in finance, you'll be obscenely rich if you can do it consistently, and probably still very rich if you can at least convince other people of your theories. To suggest that normal retail investors who don't specialize in this can obtain those advantages as well is fantasy.