Waiting for a Taiwan Stock Crash Before Buying? Retail Timing's Fatal Trap — Missing the Rally Is Worse Than Losing Money
You waited three whole years, Taiwan stocks never dropped, you never got in — and your wealth shrank anyway. Not because you lost money, but because you never earned any. The hidden cost of missing a rally is far worse than paper losses — but you won't see it on a balance sheet. Taiwan's TAIEX has delivered roughly 7% to 8% annualized total return over the past 20 years, and waiting through a 50% run-up before entering means missing opportunity cost that can never be recovered. Three side-by-side calculations in this article show a NT$1 million to NT$1.4 million wealth gap after 20 years between a disciplined DCA investor and a wait-for-crash investor whose effective invested months are only 60% as many. You'll get 3 underlying rules explaining why timing the market is structurally doomed, 4 veto-proof iron rules including a 3 to 5 year minimum time horizon on invested money, and 4 actionable steps to set up automatic DCA on a mid-month trading day and close the app.