Just keep buying

There's a book we hand to almost everyone who asks where to start: Just Keep Buying by Nick Maggiulli. Its whole argument fits in four words — the title — and it is, quietly, one of the most important ideas in investing.

The book's case is simple: save what you can, and keep buying a diversified basket of income-producing assets — month after month, in good markets and bad — rather than waiting for the perfect dip or trying to call the top. Consistency, not timing, is what tends to compound into real wealth.

That's the whole idea. Everything below is just why it works — and how we think about it.

Why equities, and why not cash

When markets feel scary, the instinct is to sit in cash or pile into bonds. Over a long horizon — especially early, when money has decades to work — that instinct has historically been an expensive one.

Some rough, long-run history (US markets, ~1926 to today, before inflation):

• Stocks — roughly 10% a year, about 7% after inflation
• Long-term bonds — roughly 5% a year, about 2% after inflation
• Cash and T-bills — roughly 3-4%, close to 0% after inflation

Small gaps, enormous consequences. A $10,000 sum left alone for 30 years (after inflation, illustrative) would have landed in very different places:

• In cash (~1% real): about $13,000
• In bonds (~2% real): about $18,000
• In stocks (~7% real): about $76,000

And cash doesn't merely grow slowly — it tends to go backwards. At 3% inflation, money in the bank loses roughly a quarter of its purchasing power every decade. Safety that quietly shrinks isn't really safety; it's a slow leak. Early on, time is the one advantage that can't be bought back, and historically equities are how that time gets put to work.

None of this is a reason to be reckless — only a reminder not to mistake doing nothing for being safe.

"Even God can't beat dollar-cost averaging"

The other half of the book is about timing — and this is the part people find hardest to believe.

Maggiulli ran a now-famous test. Picture an investor with perfect foresight who only ever buys at the exact market bottoms — a god-like dip-buyer. Now compare them with someone boring who simply invests the same amount every month, no thinking required.

The boring one wins most of the time. In his analysis, perfect timing beats steady monthly buying only about 30% of the time, because the cost of sitting in cash waiting for a dip usually outweighs the discount when it finally arrives. And no real investor has perfect foresight.

It rhymes with another well-worn number: stay fully invested in the S&P 500 over recent decades and the long-run result is solid; miss only the ten best days and roughly half the return disappears. The best days tend to land right next to the worst ones — exactly when a market-timer is most likely to have stepped off.

The takeaway isn't "markets only go up." It's that, historically, time in the market has beaten timing the market — and the most dependable way to get time in the market is to keep buying.

The practical questions

Once people sit with the idea, three questions usually follow. What follows is the book's answers and some general principles — not personal recommendations.

What to buy

The book's answer is broad, diversified, income-producing assets rather than lottery tickets — for most people, broad equity exposure as the foundation, with other return streams layered on for ballast. In that telling, the specific tickers matter far less than being diversified and actually invested — which is the job our portfolios are built to do.

How big a portion

The honest answer is whatever can be sustained consistently. A fixed slice of income, automated, tends to be worth more than a heroic one-off that can't be repeated. How much belongs in equities depends on the time horizon and how much of a drawdown someone can sit through without selling — a longer horizon and steadier nerves point to more; money needed soon points to less. As the saying goes, the best allocation is the one you'll still be holding when the market is down 20%.

When to adjust

Rarely, and on rules rather than headlines. The book's framing is to adjust when life changes — your horizon, your income, your goals — not when the market gets loud. Day to day, the approach that tends to serve people best is to keep buying and let diversification and rebalancing do the quiet work.

Where this meets our work

Risk Harvest's core philosophy is the same idea: just keep buying. We're on that journey ourselves — which is why we built this platform, and the research behind it, to work honestly through these same three questions.

On what to buy, the engine holds a diversified set of return streams — broad equity exposure plus other genuinely different, low-correlation drivers — assembled and risk-managed, so there's no guessing at a mix. On how much, positions are sized to a steady level of risk rather than to conviction, with an overall risk dial set to your own horizon and tolerance. And on when to adjust, the portfolio rebalances on rules and thresholds rather than headlines, leaving only the changes that should follow your life rather than the market's mood. None of that removes the part that matters most — the contributing and the patience are still yours — but it does take the places people most often slip and handles them by rule.

The book's takeaway is hard to improve on: start early, stay diversified, and just keep buying.