I mean, most people don't just invest all their savings in the stock market at once. Continually investing over time, or DCA, is super important.

DCA works, but isn't super important.

If you win a lump sum, studies show that the best time to put it in the market is all of it right now, not trying to time the market or DCAing it into the market. Of course, you could get unlucky, so that you're initially in the 2000->2013 style window, but you can't know that at the time.

Of course, most of us do / should invest smaller amounts over time, just because that is what our earning profile is like.

> Of course, you could get unlucky, so that you're initially in the 2000->2013 style window, but you can't know that at the time.

2000+ was only an issue for US-only, equity-only investors: if you were globally diversified you were fine. Even if you were US-only, but had at least 20% bonds, you were also fine:

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...

That somehow surprises me. Can you link such a study ?

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/dollar-cost-averaging-vs-lump-s...

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-cost-of-waiting/

Author has a repo where he often shares the data/code used in generating analysis:

* https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data

You received one good set of links, but I'm pretty sure I first read of it from a Meb Faber study that I'm not in a position to look up right now. He has done a lot of work on simplifying and making investable decent and straight forward strategies for long term investment.

Bem Felix's channel ia a great place to find empirically based investing advice. All of his videos cite the papers where the information he spouts can be sourced. About lump sum investing, you can check this video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X1qzuPRvsM0

TLDW: just invest it all, right now, in value small caps.

“Value small caps” is the consensus among Ben Felix viewers, but not really outside of that group as far as I know. He’s very convincing but I’m not sure I’d recommend everyone does that, compared with buy and hold S&P 500 or total market index.

To be fair, I think the claim is that the expected value of your return is maximized by dumping it all in today. However, I believe the variance of your return should go down as you spread out the investments, no?

> you could get unlucky

Which is the whole point of DCA. It makes it less likely to get unlucky. (It also makes it less likely to get lucky. DCA makes it more likely that you will simply regress to the mean.)

Most people don't win the lottery, they have an income they can continuously invest.

Or, if you had invested after 2008 and kept investing every year, you’d find yourself gaining money every year, and start to think “this shit is easy…always goes up”

I think you're looking only at price and not total return. Because of dividends, assuming reinvestment, it would have been sooner.