THREAD

A red morning a few weeks ago. Market down about four percent by 10am, and the group chat was already moving. Three different people said the same thing. Moved to cash, will get back in once it settles. Sounded responsible. Felt smart.

I pulled twenty years of numbers that night.

Take Rs 10 lakh, leave it fully invested for two decades at an illustrative twelve percent, and it grows to roughly Rs 96 lakh. Now sit out just the ten single best days across those twenty years, parking that money in cash on each one. You land closer to Rs 47 lakh. Half. Miss twenty of the best days and you are down near Rs 29 lakh. Thirty, and you are at Rs 18 lakh.

Ten days. Out of roughly five thousand trading days. Two tenths of one percent of the calendar deciding half the outcome.

Here is the part the move-to-cash plan never accounts for. The best days do not stand politely apart from the worst ones. They cluster in the same panicky stretches, most of the biggest up-days landing within a couple of weeks of the biggest down-days. The exit that dodges the crash is usually the same exit that skips the snapback. You do not get to keep one and avoid the other.

Which is the quiet case for a SIP. It does not read the news. It does not feel the red. It buys on a date, not a mood, automatic and boring and always in. In a scary week that is not a weakness. That is the whole edge.

The crash you sat out and the rally you missed were the same week.

How time in the market actually compounds, in plain numbers: