Perhaps the most well-known strategy in regards to investing in the stock market is “buy low, sell high”. Although it sounds simple enough, it is relatively a small number of people who have great success in stock market trading. Like sports, to be consistently successful in the stock market game requires a number of qualities. It requires a strategy, discipline, knowledge and tools. No matter what type of investor you are, you should know why you own a stock. A value investor's criteria will be different from that of a growth investor, which will be different still from an active trader. Any one strategy may work, but only if you stick to the strategy. The main point here is to be confident in your strategy and carry through with your plan. A good strategy can help us stay on track without clouding our judgment with emotion.

One of the prominent strategies employed by the stock market investing “pros” is market timing. Market timing is an attempt to use past prices and other market data to predict future prices of stocks or indexes, whether long-term or intra-day. Forecasting stock prices is a problem that has fascinated investors since the very advent of financial markets. The time to buy or sell is founded on different economic and/or stock market indicators. Market timing methods include asset allocation, technical analysis, charting, momentum investing, and numerical analysis using all kinds of mathematical and computer-based algorithms. Because market pricing is a valuable indicator of information relevant to stock valuation, pricing serves as high quality input for construction of the market timing models. Very often market timing sounds fine in theory but it seldom works in practice, and it has shown itself to be a futile tool in conducted studies.