Time to do my IRA.

I know you're not supposed to try to time the market.

Why not?

It occurred to me this March that the stock market had dropped by half, and if ever there was an opportunity to time, it was then.

So I put my money in around one week after the bottom, and it's gone up considerably.

A few days ago, I wrote a post how -- starting in September -- sales figures are going to start looking a whole lot better. Why? Because sales went into the tank last September, with the Wall Street holocaust. So instead of comparing year to year figures with a slow but not disastrous Sept. 2007 through Aug. 2008 (my sales went down starting in Sept. 2007, but moderately) we'll be comparing sales with a relatively horrid Sept. 2008 through Aug. 2010.

We're almost bound to slow the drop, or bottom out, or even show signs of improvement.

As I said, I think it's mostly illusory, the economy is anything but strong, the recovery will be weak, there's lot more bad news to come (commercial loans, etc.)

But still, it would be hard to find a worse time than the last quarter of last year.

And, finally, we are talking about the stock market here, and they are all about illusion.