Is there a sell-side version of dollar-cost averaging?
None of your options or strategies are ideal. Have you considered looking at the stock chart and making a decision? Is the price currently up-trending, or is it down-trending, or is it going sideways? As Knuckle Dragger mentions, you could just set a limit price order and if it does not hit by Friday you can just sell at whatever price on Friday. However, this could be very damaging if the price is currently down-trending. It may fall considerably by Friday. I think a better strategy would be to place a trailing stop loss order, say 5% from the current price. If the stock starts heading south you will be stopped out approximately 5% below the current price. However, if the price goes up, your trailing stop order will move up as well, always trailing 5% below the highest price reached. If the trailing stop has not been hit by Friday afternoon, you can sell at the current price. This way you will be protected on the downside (only approx. 5% below current price) and can potentially benefit from any short term upside.
"From http://blog.ometer.com/2008/03/27/index-funds/ , Lots of sensible advisers will tell you to buy index funds, but   importantly, the advice is not simply ""buy index funds.""   There are at least two other critical details: 1) asset allocation   across multiple well-chosen indexes, maintained through regular   rebalancing, and 2) dollar cost averaging (or,   much-more-complex-but-probably-slightly-better, value averaging). The   advice is not to take your single lump sum and buy and hold a   cap-weighted index forever. The advice is an investment   discipline which involves action over time, and an initial   choice among indexes. An index-fund-based   strategy is not completely passive, it involves some active risk   control through rebalancing and averaging. If you'd held a balanced portfolio over the last ten years and rebalanced, and even better if you'd dollar cost averaged, you'd have done fine. Your reaction to the last 10 years incidentally is why I don't believe an almost-all-stocks allocation makes sense for most people even if they're pretty young. More detail in this answer: How would bonds fare if interest rates rose? I think some index fund advocacy and books do people a disservice by focusing too much on the extra cost of active management and why index funds are a good deal.  That point is true, but for most investors, asset allocation, rebalancing, and ""autopilotness"" of their setup are more important to outcome than the expense ratio." "When you hear advice to buy index funds, that usually comes with two additional pieces of investment discipline advice that are important: These two elements are important to give you relative predictability in your outcome 20 years from now.  In this old blog post of mine I linked to Warren Buffett talking about this, also  mentioned it in a comment on another answer: http://blog.ometer.com/2008/03/27/index-funds/ It's perfectly plausible to do poorly over 20 years if you buy 100% stocks at once, without dollar-cost averaging or rebalancing. It's very very very plausible to do poorly over 10 years, such as the last 10 in fact. Can you really say you know your financial situation in 20-30 years, and for sure won't need that money? Because predictability is important, I like buying a balanced fund and not ""pure stocks"": http://blog.ometer.com/2010/11/10/take-risks-in-life-for-savings-choose-a-balanced-fund/ (feel a little bad linking to my blog, but retyping all that into this answer seems dumb!) Here's another tip. You can go one step past dollar cost averaging and try value averaging: http://www.amazon.com/Value-Averaging-Strategy-Investment-Classics/dp/0470049774 However, chances are you aren't even going to be good about rebalancing if it's done ""by hand,"" so personally I would not do value averaging unless you can find either a fund or a financial advisor to do it for you automatically. (Finance Buff blog makes a case for a financial advisor, in case you like that more than my balanced fund suggestion: http://thefinancebuff.com/the-average-investor-should-use-an-investment-advisor-how-to-find-one.html) Like rebalancing, value averaging makes you buy more when you're depressed about the market and less when it's exciting. It's hard.  (Dollar cost averaging is easily done by setting up automatic investment, of course, so you don't have to do it manually in the way you would with value averaging.) If you read the usual canonical books on index funds and efficient markets it's easy to remember the takeaway that nobody knows whether the market will go up or down, and yes you won't successfully time the market. But what you can do successfully is use an investment discipline with risk control: assume that the market will fluctuate, that both up and down are likely and possible, and optimize for predictability in light of that. Most importantly, optimize to take your emotions and behavior out of the picture. Some disciplines for example are: there are dozens out there, many of them snake oil, I think these I mentioned are valid. Anyway, you need some form of risk control, and putting all your money in stocks at once doesn't give you a lot of risk control. There's no real need to get creative. A balanced fund that uses index funds for equity and bond portions is a great choice." In general, lump sum investing will tend to outperform dollar cost averaging because markets tend to increase in value, so investing more money earlier will generally be a better strategy.  The advantage of dollar cost averaging is that it protects you in times when markets are overvalued, or prior to market corrections.   As an extreme example, if you done a lump-sum investment in late 2008 and then suffered through the subsequent market crash, it may have taken you 2-3 years to get back to even.  If you began a dollar cost averaging investment plan in late 2008, it may have only taken you a 6 months to get back to even. Dollar cost averaging can also help to reduce the urge to time the market, which for most investors is definitely a good thing. "You have heard the old adage ""Buy low, sell high"", right? That sounds so obvious that you'd have to wonder why they would ever bother coining such an expression. It should rank up there with ""Don't walk in front of a moving car"" on the Duh scale of advice. Well, your question demonstrates exactly why it isn't quite so obvious in the real world and that people need to be reminded of it.  So, in your example, the stock prices are currently low (relative to what they have been). So per that adage, do you sell or buy when prices are low? Hint: It isn't sell. Yes. Your gut is going to tell you the exact opposite thanks to the fact that our brains are unfortunately wired to make us susceptible to the loss aversion fallacy. When the market has undergone a big drop is the WORST time to stop contributing (buying stocks).  This example might help get your brain and gut to agree a little more easily: If you were talking about any other non-investment commodity, cars for instance.  Your question equates to.. I really need a car, but the prices have been dropping like crazy lately.    Maybe I should wait until the car dealers start raising their prices again before I buy one. Dollar Cost Averaging As littleadv suggested, if you have an automatic payroll deduction for your retirement account, you are getting the benefit of Dollar Cost Averaging. Because you are investing the same amount on a scheduled interval, you are buying more shares when they are cheap and fewer when they are expensive. It is like an automatic buy low strategy is built into the account. The alternative, which you are implying, is a market timing strategy. Under this strategy, instead of investing regularly you try to get in and out of investments right before they go up/drop. There are two MAJOR flaws with this approach:   1) Your brain will work against you (see above) and encourage you to do the exact opposite of what you should be doing.   2) Unless you are clairvoyant, this strategy isn't much better than gambling. If you are lucky it can work, but because of #1, the odds are stacked against you." most def.  When I have an algorithmic trading strategy I want to spitball, or some question about how to exploit netback pricing inefficiency between West Texas Intermediate and Brent prices based on some sort of shipping rate change, I'd like to post here.  When I want a new job, I'll go to r/financialcareers. I work at a FOREX broker, and can tell you that what you want to do is NOT possible. If someone is telling you it is, they're lying. You could (in theory) make money from the SWAP (the interest you speak of is called SWAP) if you go both short and long on the same currency, but there are various reasons why this never works. Furthermore, I don't know of any brokers that are paying positive SWAP (the interest you speak of is called SWAP) on any currency right now. Real world example.    AGNC = 21.79 time of post.  Upcoming .22 cents ex-div Mar 27th Weekly options Mar 27th - $22 strike put has a bid ask spread of .22 / .53. If you can get that put for less than .21 after trade fee's, you'll have yourself a .22 cent arbitrage.   Anything more than .21 per contract eats into your arbitrage.  At .30 cents you'll only see .13 cent arbitrage.  But still have tax liability on .22 cents.  (maybe .05 cents tax due to REIT non-exempt dividend rates)  So that .13 gain is down to a .08 cents after taxes. Canadian Couch Potato has an article which is somewhat related. Ask the Spud: Can You Time the Markets? The argument roughly boils down to the following: That said, I didn't follow the advice. I inherited a sum of money, more than I had dealt with before, and I did not feel I was emotionally capable of immediately dumping it into my portfolio (Canadian stocks, US stocks, world stocks, Canadian bonds, all passive indexed mutual funds), and so I decided to add the money into my portfolio over the course of a year, twice a month. The money that I had not yet invested, I put into a money market account. That worked for me because I was purchasing mutual funds with no transaction costs. If you are buying ETFs, this strategy makes less sense. In hindsight, this was not financially prudent; I'd have been financially better off to buy all the mutual funds right at the beginning. But I was satisfied with the tradeoff, knowing that I did not have hindsight and I would have been emotionally hurt had the stock market crashed. There must be research that would prove, based on past performance, the statistically optimal time frame for dollar-cost averaging. However, I strongly suppose that the time frame is rather small, and so I would advise that you either invest the money immediately, or dollar-cost average your investment over the course of the year. This answer is not an ideal answer to your question because it is lacking such a citation.