Every week someone asks me the same question. The market is at all-time highs. Should I wait for the crash before I start investing?

Short answer: no. Long answer: let me show you what happens to the unluckiest investor in history.

People have been calling for a crash since 2013. Some of them are very smart. Some of them have PhDs. All of them have been wrong for over a decade. The market — rudely ignoring their predictions — kept going up.

Here's the thing about crash predictions: eventually someone will be right. Markets do crash. It's built into the system. The question isn't whether the next crash is coming. It is. The question is whether waiting for it is a better strategy than investing through it.

It's not. And I can prove it with the worst-case scenario.

Let's run the numbers. October 2007. The S&P 500 hits its pre-crisis high. You — the unluckiest person alive — start investing $500 a month into a simple S&P 500 index fund on the exact worst day possible.

Over the next six months, the market drops 50%. Your stomach drops with it. Every month you put in $500, and every month it's worth less. People around you are panicking. The news is apocalyptic. Your balance is deep red.

But you don't stop. You keep putting in $500. Month after month. Through the bottom. Through the slow recovery. Through the fear.

Read that again. The market went nowhere for five years. Zero return from peak to peak. But you — the unluckiest investor — made 38%. Because you were buying cheap shares the entire way down and the entire way back up. Dollar-cost averaging isn't a theory. It's a mathematical fact that works hardest when the market works against you.

And here's the part nobody mentions: your portfolio was underwater for only about 12 months — from October 2008 to roughly October 2009. Not the five years the market took to recover. One year. Because every month you bought more shares at lower prices, pulling your average cost down far faster than the index recovered.

That's the worst case. The absolute worst. Starting at the peak before the worst financial crisis in 80 years.

So when someone tells you to wait for the crash? Ask them this: if the unluckiest person in modern investing history made 38% by not waiting, what exactly are you waiting for?

The next crash will come. I don't know when. Nobody does. The people who claim to know are the ones you should run from fastest.

But here's what I do know: the cost of waiting is guaranteed. The benefit of timing is not. Every month you sit in cash "waiting for a better entry point" is a month of compounding you never get back.

Start now. Start small if you have to. But start. The math doesn't care about your feelings. It only cares about time.

And if the crash comes the month after you start? Good. You just got shares on sale. The unluckiest investor in history will tell you — that's exactly where the money is made.