XIU.TO, SPY, QQQ, and DIA all closed at or near fresh all-time highs this week. The TSX 60 is up over 34% in the past twelve months. That has me looking at my portfolio and asking the same question a lot of Canadian DIY investors are probably asking right now: keep buying, or wait for a pullback that might never come? Here is what 75 years of market data and the academic research actually say.
What’s happening this week
All prices below are closing prices as of Tuesday, May 26, 2026.
- SPY (S&P 500): $750.56, a fresh all-time high above the previous high of $748.17 set on May 14. The S&P 500 has now logged its eighth straight weekly gain, its longest streak since December 2023.
- QQQ (Nasdaq 100): $730.28, also a fresh all-time high above the previous May 14 close of $719.79.
- DIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average): $505.26, slightly off its all-time-high close of $506.12 set four days earlier on May 22.
- XIU.TO (iShares S&P/TSX 60): $50.89, down from May 25’s close of $51.25 but still near its recent 52-week peak. Up roughly 9% YTD and over 30% on the trailing twelve months.
Why all-time highs feel scary (but the data disagrees)
The intuition is simple. If something is already at the top, it has nowhere to go but down, so the instinct is to wait for a pullback. The intuition is wrong, and the data on this is unusually clear.
RBC Global Asset Management ran the numbers on every all-time high the S&P 500 has reached since 1950. Looking out one year from each ATH, the index was in a correction of more than 10% only 9% of the time. Most years following an ATH, the market kept going up. Looking out five years, the S&P 500 has never been down by more than 10% at the end of any five-year period that started at an all-time high. Not once in 75 years.
The market spends most of its life at or near all-time highs by design. Sitting out every time means mostly sitting out the market.
What the academic research actually says
Vanguard’s February 2023 study compared investing a lump sum immediately vs. dollar-cost averaging across every rolling period from 1976 to 2022. Lump-sum investing beat DCA 68% of the time, by an average of 2 to 3 percentage points over a 10-year horizon. The same study made a sharper point that often gets missed: the worst of the three strategies tested was holding cash and waiting for the right moment. Worse than DCA, worse than lump sum.
The takeaway lines up with what the broader academic literature has been saying for years. Indexing tends to win long term, market timing tends to lose, and the worst time to be in cash is when waiting for the right moment to leave it.
The Canadian context: XIU at all-time highs is its own story
Most of the all-time-high analysis online is US-focused. The Canadian picture is worth understanding on its own terms.
XIU.TO tracks the S&P/TSX 60. The TSX is dominated by financials, energy, and materials. The US indices are dominated by technology. Completely different engines. The top 10 holdings of XIU make up roughly half the fund, so it’s more concentrated than the US indices.
There’s also a Canadian-specific tax angle worth remembering. Inside a TFSA, growth is tax-free, so there’s literally no penalty for buying at a high. Inside an RRSP, the deduction is taken now and tax is paid on withdrawal, so entry timing matters even less. The “should I wait?” question matters most in a non-registered account, where capital-gains tax applies. Even there, the cost of waiting in cash (currently around 3 to 4% in a Canadian high-interest savings account) is usually higher than the cost of a moderate pullback that might be captured by waiting.
Things I am considering at this time
This is where I am personally on this. Not advice, just notes from my own portfolio review this week. Why this site exists is to share that thinking openly.
Continue monthly investing in my current 80/20 allocation. My target is 80% equities, 20% fixed income, and that doesn’t change because the market hit a new high. Regular monthly contributions to TFSA and RRSP keep going in on schedule. (More detail on my actual portfolio composition is coming in a separate article.)
Park existing RRSP cash in a high-interest cash ETF. My total cash allocation is around 30% right now, much of it sitting unused in the RRSP. Rather than deploying that lump sum at these levels, I plan to park it in CASH.TO (Global X High Interest Savings ETF). It yields roughly 3 to 4% with effectively zero capital risk, and stays liquid for whenever I decide to deploy.
Why park it. Two specific events make me cautious about deploying that lump sum right now.
- US midterm elections (November 2026). Going back to 1950, the S&P 500’s average intra-year drawdown in midterm years has been around 17.5%. Twelve of the 17 midterm cycles since 1957 saw the index hit correction territory (10% or more) at some point during the year. The full-year return is usually flat or modestly positive, but the path is bumpy, with most of the recovery coming after the election (the index has averaged +12 to +14% in the six to twelve months following midterms).
- A change of Fed leadership in play this year. Fed-chair transitions have historically been periods of elevated market uncertainty. Deutsche Bank research back to 1925 shows a mixed record: some transitions have been smooth, others have coincided with meaningful corrections as markets re-priced expectations around the incoming chair’s policy stance.
Neither of these guarantees a correction. They just widen the distribution of likely outcomes over the next six to twelve months, and I’d rather sit on dry powder for that window than deploy a lump sum now and hope.
Bottom line
The general question has a clean answer. The historical data is unambiguous: all-time highs aren’t a sell signal, and they aren’t a reason to pause regular contributions. Vanguard and RBC’s research both point the same direction.
The narrower question of whether to deploy a big sitting cash position right now is more nuanced. My personal answer this week is to keep the monthly contributions running on the 80/20 plan, but park the larger sitting cash in CASH.TO until there’s more visibility into how the US midterms shake out and how the Fed leadership transition settles into a clearer policy stance. That’s a judgment call based on the asymmetric setup of these two specific events, not a market-timing prediction, and I could easily be wrong. The distinction worth holding onto: stopping a regular investing plan is a fundamentally different question from deciding when to deploy a one-time lump sum.
Sources
- SPY all-time high closing price + 8-week win streak. Macrotrends SPY price history. Advisor Perspectives S&P 500 Snapshot (May 22, 2026).
- QQQ all-time high closing price. Macrotrends QQQ price history.
- XIU.TO performance and holdings. iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF (XIU) on BlackRock Canada.
- 75-year analysis of S&P 500 returns from all-time highs. RBC Global Asset Management: Investing at all-time highs.
- Lump sum vs. dollar-cost averaging study (1976-2022). Vanguard Research: Cost averaging: invest now or temporarily hold your cash? (Feb 2023, PDF).
- DIA all-time high (May 22, 2026) and current price. Macrotrends DIA price history.
- Midterm election year market volatility and intra-year drawdown patterns. Capital Group: Can midterm elections move markets? 5 charts to watch. LPL Research: Midterms and the Markets: Does History Matter?. Northern Trust: Midterm Elections & US Markets: A Guide.
- Post-midterm recovery pattern (S&P 500 has historically averaged +12% to +16% in the 6-12 months following midterms). J.P. Morgan: US midterms, what’s next for markets?. U.S. Bank: How midterm elections affect the stock market.
- Fed-chair transitions and market volatility (Deutsche Bank historical research, 1925-present). Investing.com: Does a new Fed Chair always bring market turmoil?. U.S. News & World Report: How a New Fed Chair Could Impact Stocks.
- CASH.TO (Global X High Interest Savings ETF), the cash equivalent referenced. Global X: CASH product page.
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