Stocks continue to defy the bears.Being bearish is inherently problematic because historically stocks tend to go up… and quite a lot. Over the last 100 years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has finished the year up 68% of the time. And as you can see in the chart below… they’ve gone up a LOT. 
Investing is all about probabilities, and if there is a greater than two thirds odds that stocks will go up in any given year, betting on a collapse is generally going to be a losing bet.Understand, I’m not suggesting you should be mindlessly optimistic about the markets. There are always risks. But from a big picture perspective, stocks tend to go up, and go up quite a lot.This should be the foundation for your view of the markets.So why not simply buy stocks any time you have any additional capital?Because when stocks DON’T go up, they either:1) Go nowhere for years, if not decades.2) Can lose a LOT of money VERY quickly.Regarding #1, take a look at the below chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1919. You’ll note that there were three periods in which stocks went nowhere for a considerable length of time.They were:1) 1923-1953 (30 years)2) 1963-1982 (19 years)3) 1993-2015 (22 years) 
Anyone who loaded up on stocks automatically throughout these time periods didn’t make a cent for decades. There are a lot of analysts who ignore these facts and tell their clients to simply buy stocks for the long-term at any time, but what are the odds that a real person, putting real money to work in the markets could sit through ~20 years of NO gains and not despair?More By This Author:The Fed Has Made A Crucial Mistake… What Does That Mean For Stocks? Immigration, Wages, And The Phillips CurveWhy Stocks Are Falling… And What Comes Next
