“I’ll wait for the market to fall before I buy.”
I have heard some version of this countless times over the years.
And on the surface, it sounds perfectly sensible.
Why buy when stocks are expensive if you can wait for a better price?
Well, on 15 September 2026 (Tuesday), investors got their better price.
The Straits Times Index (SGX: ^STI) fell 79.38 points, or 1.4%, in a single day, closing at 5,638.64.
Just a day earlier, it had closed at 5,718.02.
So let me ask you a question.
Did you buy?
There was your lower price
Imagine you had S$10,000 sitting in cash on Monday.
You looked at the market and decided:
“Too expensive. I’ll wait for a pullback.”
Twenty-four hours later, the STI was almost 80 points lower.
There was your pullback.
There was your cheaper price.
Yet I suspect many investors would have found it much harder to press the buy button on Tuesday than they imagined.
Because once prices start falling, a different set of questions takes over.
What if the market falls another 100 points tomorrow?
What if this is the start of something bigger?
Maybe I should wait and see.
Perhaps it will be even cheaper next week.
And just like that, the goalposts move.
We want lower prices. But we also want certainty.
That is one of the strange things about investing.
When share prices are rising, we wish we had bought earlier.
We tell ourselves that if only prices came down a little, we would happily buy.
Then prices actually fall.
And suddenly, what we really want is not just a lower price.
We want a lower price together with reassurance that it will not fall further.
Unfortunately, markets do not usually give us both.
Lower prices rarely arrive with a note saying:
Don’t worry. Everything is fine. This is definitely a good time to buy.
Usually, they arrive together with a reason to feel nervous.
On that Tuesday, weakness across Asian markets came amid concerns over the pace of artificial intelligence development.
In Singapore, losers heavily outnumbered gainers, and all three local banks ended the day lower.
In other words, there was a reason investors felt uncomfortable.
There almost always is.
So should you have bought on Tuesday?
Here is where things get tricky.
I am not saying Tuesday was “the bottom”.
Nobody knew that.
And nobody knew whether the market would fall another 1%, 5% or 20%.
That is not the lesson.
The lesson is this:
If your plan is to wait until lower prices also feel comfortable, you may end up waiting a very long time.
By Friday, 18 September, the STI had recovered part of Tuesday’s decline.
That does not prove Tuesday was some wonderful buying opportunity. It simply shows how quickly the situation can change.
At the start of the week, the market may have looked too expensive to buy. Once prices fell, the uncertainty made buying feel uncomfortable for a different reason. And when the market recovered some ground, the hesitation simply shifted again.
That is the difficulty with waiting for the “right” moment. The reason for not buying can change faster than the market itself.
Decide before the scary day arrives
This is why I think investors should spend less time trying to predict exactly when the next correction will happen.
Instead, decide what you will do when it does.
Suppose you have S$10,000 to invest.
Maybe you do not need to put all S$10,000 into the market at once.
You could invest part of it today.
Keep some aside.
And if attractive companies become cheaper, you already know what you are prepared to do.
The exact method matters less than having a plan.
Because making calm decisions is easy when everything is calm.
The real test comes when the market falls and every headline gives you another reason to wait.
Get Smart: What will you actually do?
There will be bigger declines than last Tuesday’s.
Much bigger ones.
Some will recover quickly.
Others will not.
We will not know which is which beforehand.
So perhaps the question is not:
“When will the market give me a good opportunity to buy?”
A better question is:
“What will I actually do when it does?”
Because saying you want lower prices is easy.
Buying when lower prices finally arrive is much harder.
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