To consider this approach, consider whether you will be a buyer or a seller of unit trust funds over the next few years? As a buyer, you will want to buy low and a market drop can be a terrific opportunity to do just that. Yet following a market drop, many erstwhile buyers, rather than continuing to scoop up the units on the cheap, choose to become panic sellers, even though they won’t need the money for perhaps another 10, 15 or 20 years.

Panic selling only turns paper losses into real losses. Sellers might seriously regret their decision should the market bounce back quickly. If you are engaged in regular monthly investing — perhaps through your RA or provident plan at work — you are already Rand Cost Averaging.

For the long-term investor it is virtually impossible to predict market highs and lows. If market timing could be practised reliably many more managed funds would outperform the indices.

Financial planners will often choose the RCA route to avoid market timing, but the truth is that it is a form of market timing. It has been argued that it serves more to assuage the conscience of the financial planner than it has served the financial interests of the client. M-Cubed capital conducted research to assess whether this is true by looking at the differential performance between a strategy whereby the investor used a six-month period to "Rand Cost" their way into the market, and a strategy where the investment was made on a lump sum basis.

The lump sum investment approach was a better choice over 62 percent of the period assessed, while the Rand Cost Averaging approach was superior for only 38 percent of the time period. Still, there are clearly times when the market would seem overheated to both the adviser and the client. In these cases it's a judgement call and at least now you’ll have another option at your disposal.