This is absolutely true. What I've found is that there isn't a silver bullet for this, and to mitigate it I use several techniques. One of them is, just don't pay attention to many stocks. Focus on specific stocks which offer the likelihood of outsized returns. PEG is just a quick check but Apple's growing at %70-%100 a year but trading usually under 15 times earnings making it a way to buy very high growth cheaply. Another method is to wait for the stock to be near its 200 day moving average. A third method is to phase your purchases of stock over a period of time. If you have $10,000 to invest, spend $2,000 a month on the stock... preferably when its at or near its 50 day moving average (or well below it if you get that chance.)

Also useful is to recognize that "high" and "low" will change depending on what time horizon you're looking at. Over 10 years, $580 is probably a really low price. Over 10 minutes, who knows.

I wouldn't buy common stock unless I planned to hold it for 5-10 years. For most people that's the way to approach it and buy these really stellar companies (you don't have to be in everything. Who knows if netflix is going to outperform everything on the market over the next 10 years or not. If you get a fantastic return from the stock you do invest in, its silly to kick yourself for not investing in the winner.)

I looked at Apple when it was $13 a share and said "Damn that's a good buy, they have $6 a share in pure cash." And I didn't buy. I didn't buy for a decade after that. I never thought Apple was a company I understood well enough, despite following the company for over 30 years at that point.

I made my first Apple investment in December 2011, around $380 or $390, and totally missed the bottom.

(Meanwhile in 2001, I knew there would be a housing bubble, placed myself to profit from it, knew it was going to burst and went short the housing market in 2007... a year early, but you don't complain about once in a lifetime setups like that.)

You're never going to time it perfectly-- I'm really proud of my 2007 discipline, to switch positions when every TV channel was screaming that I was wrong (actually one of the indicators that gave me confidence).

If I'd bought Apple at $14, and it had gone down to $10, was it a bad buy? With hindsight you can see it wasn't... the thing to nail is whether the company has a solid future. I didn't know when Apple was at $14, but I do know now. (And yes, they do. They've got a lot of growth and while Steve Jobs liked the term "magical" there's actually nothing magical about Apple at all. No special insight, no secret, just really solid execution and focusing on the right things. Any company could do it... the question is why they don't, not why Apple is able to do it.)

Finally, if you're willing to spend some time learning, I highly recommend McMillions "Options as a strategic investment". Its something like 1,000 pages. Read that and you'll really level up. (Options allow you to dial up, or down, risk as much as you wish. But they do take some focus and thinking. But they're not hard. You don't need to read the whole book, but if you do, you'll have passed a hurdle that says its time to spend some time playing with a paper account for about 6 months, then after that, you can start working with real money. You don't want to jump into options uninformed and full of confidence.)

BTW, you said you "don't play the stock game", and that's fine... you're making a valid point about the difficulty (impossibility?) of timing, and I wanted to respond to that for those who have an interest in playing the "game".