On the Irrelevance of Trade Timing.

Given standard, transparent assumptions, this paper questions the Wall Street adage that 'timing is everything'. I show that for an Arrow security, a 'small' risk-neutral trader with private information that is conditionally independent of the public information is exactly indifferent about the timing of his trade: His expected return per dollar invested is a martingale. This is true despite the fact that he expects the asset price itself to rise given favorable information and fall given unfavorable information.