Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Entering the stock market in a poor economy
Forecasts of stock market direction are not reliable, so you shouldn't be putting much weight on them.  Long term, you can expect to do better in stocks, but obtaining this better expected return has the danger of "buying in" to the market at a particularly bad moment, leading to a substantially lower return.  So mitigate that risk while moving in a big piece of cash by "dollar cost averaging".  An example would be to divide your cash hoard (conceptually) into say six pieces, and invest each piece in the index fund two months apart.  After a year you will have invested the whole sum at about the average of the index for the year.