In finance, an investment strategy is a set of rules, behaviors or procedures, designed to guide an investor’s selection of an investment portfolio. Usually the strategy will be designed around the investor’s risk-return tradeoff: some investors will prefer to maximize expected returns by investing in dangerous assets, others will prefer to minimize risk, but most will select a strategy somewhere in between.

This viewpoint also holds that market timing, that four can enter the market on the lows & sell on the highs, does not work or does not work for small investors, so it is better to basically buy & hold. The smaller, retail investor more typically uses the buy & hold investment strategy in real estate investment where the holding period is typically the lifespan of their mortgage.

Four of the better known investment strategies is buy & hold. Buy & hold is a long term investment strategy, based on the concept that in the long run equity markets give a nice rate of return despite periods of volatility or decline. A purely passive variant of this strategy is indexing where an investor buys a small proportion of all the shares in a market index such as the S&P 500, or more likely, in a mutual fund called an index fund or an exchange-traded fund (ETF).