It's hard to time the market. Don't even try.

Here's my experience with the recent Black Monday and how investing in stocks sometimes hurt big time.

I saw my stock portfolio depreciating little by little for one month already. I had some money saved and thought I'd buy more stocks while it's still low. That was Monday morning 9 AM. I entered my buy order on my favorite online broker then let it be.

2 hours later, I wanted to check if my order pushed through. That's when I saw the sea of red numbers all over my screen. Not only it was red, it went down really low. -5% at that time.

I checked again this morning and my portfolio went almost 8% down. All in all, my savings stock profits went almost down since 2 months ago.

I realized that it's so hard to time the market. I thought it was low already and didn't think it could go much lower than that.

I still believe in my financial strategy: buy and hold. I still believe that after a huge market correction like the one we just got, we'll experience a bull run that will lead to new record highs. That's what I experienced with the 2008 market crash. 7 years after, the stocks have reached records highs. I hope we'll experience the same thing again.

As of today, the Philippine Stock Exchange Index is at 6,791 down from a 8,128 back in April. That's roughly a 16% decrease.

I'll review this post next year and compare how the stock market will perform from this point.