Large rebalancing - all in or strategic timing?

[Storm]

I just got paid an annual bonus at work, along with a sizable tax return, I have a lot of cash to rebalance (hit 37% in cash).

My temptation is to try and market time a little bit - For example, stocks have been down a lot recently, so maybe buy a few thousand worth of stocks.  Gold is up today, so maybe wait a bit before buying some more gold.

Is this wise or foolish?  Should I rebalance over the course of 10 market trading days, with 10% each day buying the lagging asset?  Or is it better to just go "all in" and buy the 3 lagging assets all at once?

Thanks for your advice on this.

[MediumTex]

Have you traded profitably in the past?

If not, I would perhaps wait a few days and see if what you are proposing still seems like a good idea.

[AdamA]

Is this wise or foolish?  Should I rebalance over the course of 10 market trading days, with 10% each day buying the lagging asset? 

Wise if you're right, foolish if you're wrong, but, honestly, unlikely to matter very much.  Just buy all at once.

[Lone Wolf]

Congratulations on the bonus!  Must have been a nice one!  If you'd really like to avoid a rebalance, consider sharing the extra 2% in cash with your friends at gyroscopicinvesting.com. 

There's no way to know in advance whether any of this will matter.  If it were me, I'd just buy all at once and then not check on the portfolio for a month.

[craigr]

For long term investing it has basically no significance. I lump sum personally and have never regretted it. But I have regretted waiting in the past.

[Storm]

Thanks for the tips - my reasoning behind buying 10% at a time over 10 trading days was that perhaps stocks fell today, so I buy the dip, then perhaps gold falls tomorrow, buy the dip.  Averaging in over 10 days might be buying more dips.  Also, it seems scary to buy a bunch of gold at $1550 an ounce, but what do I know?

You have some good points - waiting to buy in I might miss out on some market gains for the next 9 days.  In the end it's probably a wash.

[julian]

I agree with Craig. Whenever I waited I regretted it. Lump is the way to go. If a few percentage points either way mkes a difference, we are all in trouble.

[Storm]

Thanks for the moral support - went all in today.  The strength of the PP is not in each asset, but how the assets move inversely to each other.  If, for some reason the stock market is tanking, the bond market usually picks up the slack.  Buying into just one asset might give me a better entry point there, but if there is a large movement that day I could totally miss out on fluctuations that make the PP work.

Still not perfect - need to move some cash out of FDIC savings into IRA, but it's getting close: