Now that the stock market has gotten into another volatile phase - swinging up and down in sync with jittery investor sentiment - the dooms-day forecasters and soothsayers alike have started coming out of the woodwork. There are as many advisers warning us “sell-off time is NOW”, as others saying “the bull market is still on, even though bull run may be over”.

This is also the time when a few market timers catch their lucky break. If stock prices fluctuate without any apparent regularity, by pure chance anyone can succeed once in a while in offloading just before a crash. But market almost always recovers as rapidly as it falls. Kiplinger recently noted that a timer has to be lucky not once, but twice - to get out at a high, and also to get in at the next low. Even that kind of luck is occasionally possible, but consistent market timing would be a rare feat indeed!