Buying XEQT at All-Time Highs: Why Your Entry Point Matters Less Than You Think
May 25, 2026
XEQT is sitting near $44, close to its 52-week high of $44.14, and you’re staring at the buy button. Everything in your gut says the same thing: this seems like a terrible time to get in. Markets feel stretched. You’ve been reading headlines. You want to wait for a pullback before committing real money. This instinct feels responsible. It is not.
The fear of buying at all-time highs is one of the most common, most studied, and most consistently wrong instincts in personal investing. It’s worth understanding exactly why, because the answer isn’t just “trust the process.” There is actual data behind it, and that data points in a direction most investors don’t expect.
All-Time Highs Are More Normal Than You Think
The phrase “all-time high” carries a psychological weight that the numbers don’t really support. It sounds like an extreme, a peak, a precarious ledge. In reality, new all-time highs are a routine feature of long-running equity markets.
Research tracking the S&P 500 since 1950 found that roughly 7% of all trading days have been new all-time highs. In the 1990s, that figure reached 12.3%. In the 2020s so far, it has run at approximately 13%, exceeding even that record. Since the market recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and set new highs in 2013, there have been over 447 new all-time highs in the S&P 500 alone, approaching the 505 recorded across the entire 1982 to 2000 bull run.
In other words, if you had resolved to “never buy at an all-time high,” you would have sat out of the market on one in every fourteen trading days. Over a decade of investing, that is not a strategy. It is a permanent bias toward inaction.
New all-time highs are not warning signs. Historically, they cluster during extended bull markets and are followed, on average, by returns that are equal to or higher than non-high entry points. The fear is understandable. The data doesn’t support it.
What the Data Shows About Forward Returns From All-Time Highs
Is it actually worse to buy when the market is near a record? Researchers have examined this carefully by comparing forward returns from entry points near all-time highs versus entry points that were off recent peaks. The findings are consistently humbling for market timers.
Over a one-year horizon, returns from all-time high entry points are roughly similar to returns from other entry points, with non-high entries showing a modest statistical edge in some studies. But here is where it gets interesting: over a three-year horizon, the data flips. Research comparing “near ATH” versus “off ATH” entry points for US equities found annualized three-year returns of approximately 8.4% for near-ATH investors versus 7.8% for those who waited. Not dramatically different, but directionally the opposite of what most people assume.
The intuition behind this makes sense once you think about it. Markets spend a lot of time near all-time highs precisely because strong economic conditions drive them there and keep them there. A market that is hitting new records frequently is often one in the middle of sustained growth, not one about to tip over. Non-ATH entry points, by contrast, often occur in the middle of uncertainty, downturns, and bear markets, conditions that can persist and deepen before recovering.
None of this is a guarantee. Any short-term entry point carries risk, regardless of where the market is relative to its history. But the data simply does not support the idea that buying near a high is materially worse than waiting. And waiting carries its own very real cost.
The XEQT Context: XEQT is currently trading at approximately $43.98 CAD, near its 52-week high of $44.14. The TSX Composite is at 34,471 points, also near a 52-week record. If history is any guide, this proximity to a high is not a reason to pause, it is simply where markets spend a lot of their time.
Why All-Time Highs Feel So Much Scarier Than They Are
Understanding the data is one thing. Understanding why the fear persists despite the data is another, and it matters if you want to actually act on what you know.
Behavioural finance researchers have identified several overlapping biases that make buying at all-time highs feel uniquely dangerous. The first is loss aversion, the well-documented human tendency to feel losses approximately twice as intensely as equivalent gains. When you buy at a high and the market drops 10%, that loss feels enormous relative to what you’d have felt if you’d missed a 10% gain by sitting out. The pain of buying high and then watching prices fall is vivid and concrete. The pain of sitting in cash while prices rise is diffuse and easy to dismiss.
The second is anchoring bias. Once you see a price and decide it’s “too high,” that number becomes a psychological reference point you can’t easily let go of. If XEQT was at $38 six months ago and is now at $44, your brain treats $38 as the “real” price and $44 as an inflated one. This is economically irrational, the past price tells you nothing useful about the future price, but it’s a deeply wired cognitive pattern.
The third is availability bias. When markets are near highs, financial media is full of analysts warning about stretched valuations and predicting corrections. Those warnings are easy to recall, so they feel more probable than they are. The counterfactual, that markets stayed near highs and kept climbing, receives far less airtime, even though it describes the more common outcome.
The fear of buying high is, at its core, a fear of short-term regret. But you are not investing for the next six months. If your time horizon is ten or twenty years, the entry point you obsess over today will be nearly invisible on your eventual return chart.
What “High” Even Means in a 20-Year Context
Here is a thought experiment worth sitting with. Imagine someone who bought XEQT’s predecessor index exposure in 2010 and agonized that markets were “too high” after recovering from the financial crisis. From their vantage point in 2010, the recovery felt fragile and prices felt elevated relative to the lows of 2008 and 2009. That entry point, which felt dangerous then, looks like an obvious bargain from today.
The S&P 500 has delivered average annualized returns of roughly 10% over a century of data, including dividends. That long-run upward drift means that nearly every price, in hindsight, turns out to be cheaper than what followed. The price you call “too high” today will very likely be the price someone else calls “unbelievably cheap” in fifteen years.
XEQT owns approximately 45% US equities, 25% Canadian equities, 25% international developed markets, and 5% emerging markets. That global diversification means you’re not making a single bet on one market at one valuation. You are spreading ownership across thousands of companies in dozens of countries, all of which benefit from the same long-run reality: businesses generate profits, profits compound, and global equity markets, over time, reflect that compounding.
If you want a full breakdown of how XEQT is constructed and what you’re actually buying, the complete XEQT guide covers the underlying ETFs, the MER, and why the structure works for long-term Canadian investors.
The Practical Problem With Waiting for a Pullback
Let’s say you decide to wait. The market pulls back 8% over the next two months. You feel vindicated, now is clearly a better time to buy. But two new problems have emerged.
First, you don’t actually know if the pullback is over. It might be the beginning of a much deeper decline, in which case you should wait more. Or it might bounce back sharply the following week, leaving you exactly where you started but now worried about buying “after the recovery.” Every piece of information the market delivers becomes a reason to wait a little longer.
Second, and more practically: a Bank of America study found that missing just the ten best trading days in the S&P 500 over a 30-year period cut total returns roughly in half compared to staying fully invested. Several of those best days occurred in the middle of the worst months, when fear was highest and the temptation to stay in cash was strongest. The investor waiting for a “safer” entry point is statistically likely to miss exactly those days.
This is why the canonical answer in evidence-based investing, invest when you have money, not when you feel confident, sounds naïve but survives every data test thrown at it. The strategy that requires you to feel good about current conditions before acting is a strategy that will frequently leave you on the sidelines.
Account Limits for 2026: TFSA room is $7,000 for the year, plus any unused room from prior years. RRSP room is 18% of prior year earned income. FHSA allows $8,000 per year with a $40,000 lifetime limit. Every month cash sits idle in a registered account is tax-sheltered compounding you cannot recover.
Does This Apply Even to Large Lump Sums?
The all-time-high anxiety intensifies when the amount being invested is large, an inheritance, a home sale proceed, a severance payment. When six figures are on the line, the fear of “buying the top” becomes almost paralyzing.
Vanguard’s historical modelling examined this specific scenario directly. Across US, UK, and Australian markets over rolling 10-year periods, investing a lump sum immediately outperformed a systematic, delayed approach approximately two-thirds of the time. The reason is straightforward: if markets trend upward over time, waiting to invest means deliberately paying tomorrow’s prices instead of today’s, and tomorrow’s prices are expected to be higher.
Dollar-cost averaging a lump sum is not irrational, it is a reasonable concession to psychology, and if it’s the only way you can bring yourself to invest rather than perpetually delaying, it is far better than staying in cash indefinitely. But it is worth being clear that you are trading expected return for emotional comfort. That is a trade you’re allowed to make, just make it consciously.
For context on how regular monthly investing works alongside a lump sum strategy, the framework in our article on how much XEQT you need to retire walks through realistic contribution scenarios and what they build over time.
What This Looks Like in Practice for a Canadian Investor
You have $20,000 in a TFSA, sitting in a savings account. XEQT is at $44, near its high. Here is what the evidence-based approach looks like.
Open Wealthsimple or Questrade if you haven’t already. Buy XEQT. Set up an automatic contribution from each paycheque. Stop refreshing the chart to see if prices have moved. The work is done.
You don’t need a lower entry point to make this strategy work. You need time. The investors who built meaningful wealth through XEQT or its equivalent over the last decade were not the ones who timed their entry perfectly. They were the ones who started, stayed invested through significant market volatility along the way, and did not sell when headlines were terrifying. The entry price was not the differentiating variable. Staying invested was.
XEQT’s 0.20% MER means $20 per year per $10,000 invested. The cost of the fund is not what will determine your outcome. Whether you are in the market compounding or sitting in cash agonizing about valuations, that is the variable that matters.
An all-time high is not a ceiling. It is a data point showing that the long-run upward bias of global equity markets is working exactly as it should. The correct response is not to wait for it to stop working.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it a bad idea to buy XEQT when markets are at all-time highs? The historical evidence says no. Research comparing entry points near all-time highs versus other periods finds no meaningful disadvantage to buying at a high. Over three-year horizons, near-ATH entry points have historically produced slightly better returns than non-ATH entries, not worse ones.
Should I wait for a market correction before buying XEQT? Waiting for a correction is a form of market timing, and it has a poor track record even among professional fund managers. Corrections do happen, but they are unpredictable in timing and magnitude. Waiting for one typically means missing gains, and there is no guarantee the correction will arrive before prices move even higher.
What if the market drops right after I buy XEQT at a high? It might. Short-term drops after any entry point are possible. The appropriate response is to hold, and ideally to keep contributing so that your new purchases are at the lower price. XEQT is a globally diversified, automatically rebalanced fund with a 0.20% MER, it is built to be held through volatility, not traded around it. Investors who held through major drawdowns in XEQT’s history recovered and continued compounding when they stayed the course.
How is this different from just saying “don’t time the market”? The all-time-high concern is a specific psychological trigger that deserves a specific answer. The data on forward returns from ATH entry points, the frequency with which new highs occur, and the behavioural biases that make highs feel scarier than they are, these are distinct from the general market-timing argument. The short answer is the same, but the why is worth understanding so you can actually act on it when it matters.