I also sought out Roy Neuberger, then 106 years old (he retired at the tender age of 99). The fund manager had shorted RCA, the Apple of its day, in 1929. Too frail to speak, his protégé Marvin Schwartz, a 68-year old whippersnapper, told me the secret to his success.

“In almost each and every instance, he advised us to buy in what would be a passing negative period,” he said.

Neuberger wrote in his memoirs that memories of 1929 helped his firm, Neuberger Berman, trounce competitors after the 1987 stock market crash.

I was too late to speak with yet another long-lived investing legend, Sir John Templeton, who had passed away just a year earlier at the age of 95. Back in September 1939, when Nazi tanks were rolling into Poland, he borrowed $10,000 to buy 100 shares in every issue on the New York Stock Exchange trading for less than a dollar. He made a killing. In early 2000, when only old fogies who “didn’t get it” weren’t in the market, Templeton sold all of his technology stocks just ahead of that bubble’s bursting. His motto was “to buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are greedily buying.” The right time to make the plunge was “at the point of maximum pessimism.”

Being profitably contrarian is the stuff of investing legends, but what about mom and pop? Any financial advisor worth his or her salt should discourage clients from any overt market timing. I show in my book, Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor, that the largest component of retail investor underperformance is zigging when one should zag—two percentage points a year or so.

But another form of contrarian timing can be a great boon to a nest egg. Frequent portfolio rebalancing forces an investor to buy low and sell high at the margin. Adding a value or dividend twist is even better. The key is to take all cognitive bias out of the equation and to do it on autopilot. Low-cost target date funds and smart beta to the rescue!

Ah, but the typical investor continues to lag a typical mix of stocks and bonds by three-to-four percentage points a year. What gives?

Beta can be as smart as a whip but individuals still make dumb decisions with their portfolio. For example, value funds outperform plain vanilla stock funds but the dollar-weighted return in those funds is lower than for their broader counterparts. The more trying the strategy the harder it is to fight the urge to cut and run when markets are at extremes of panic or exuberance.