[bolu]

Because we used the inflows & outflows of a couple large retail mutual funds as proxy for investor demand, you're right that the story actually is "retail investors are bad at timing the market".

There's a whole other set of data to dive into whether or not professional managers as a whole are bad at market timing (spoiler: they are terrible at it), but you're right in that this is not what this data set addresses.

Really the point the article is making is that on the whole, you and I, the investing public, shouldn't try to "read the tea leaves" and pull our money in and out of the market / move money around in the market because of what we believe will happen in the near future. What this data proves is that this doesn't actually work.