Timing the market

You have no doubt seen the stock market in the news lately. Wild swings of a thousand points have made everyone nervous about what's going to happen. Will it crash? Will it jump again? What effect will the current (and future) administration's policies have?

There are people who try to time the market. They want to buy when the market hits bottom, and sell when it hits the top. The problem is in knowing when that will happen. Nobody knows - but everyone has a guess. The professionals don't know, but they have a number of tools to help them - various algorithms and indices which say “sell when this number reaches X!” Amateurs don't know either, they may as well be reading tea leaves.

Fact is, you cannot know what the market will do. Studies have even shown that people who try to time the market do less well than people who just put their money in and leave it alone. Those people may not even notice the market going up and down, because they're playing the long game, expecting it will go up eventually.

This same method works in the power generation industry. It is difficult to know what the plans are of any individual generating company. They do have a number of requirements for reporting material changes, but usually by the time these things are public knowledge, it is too late to do anything about it.

The way to market into the industry is with long-term thinking. By that I mean ignoring the ups and downs of the news cycle, and having a continuous presence in the market. Be the long-term investor, putting in a small investment every week, and seeing it grow over the years.

A newsletter or a blog can work to do this for you. By keeping your company's name and what you do in the back of a potential client's mind, it will come to the forefront when necessary. Don't try to guess when their next maintenance cycle will begin, so you can market your product to them. Put your product in their mind so that as that cycle begins, they think of you.

You're probably aware that it is much easier to sell to a customer that comes to you, than to one you try and reach out to. The other advantage is that you never have to hear someone say no. If they come to you they don't want to say no, they're already interested and they want to say yes. Hearing a no is like selling at the bottom of the market - it might be the right thing for them, but the timing is just terrible.