Telling someone to sit tight amidst volatility is one thing. Getting them to listen to this time-proven advice is another thing entirely.

And believe me, I don’t kid myself. I know many of our readers, despite my pleading, sold all or most of their holdings near one of the many bottoms we have seen since the beginning of January.

But I am going to pound the table one more time to try to save a few of us from ourselves.

This time though, I am going to show you in hard numbers how you are flushing your retirement down the toilet by panic-selling and trying to time the markets.

And, yes, selling when you’re fearful and buying when it looks like the Dow is going to 25,000 are just two forms of market timing. (You’ll see why in a minute.)

If you didn’t already know it, most of the stock market’s returns happen in just a handful of days in a decade. If you miss them, you miss most or all of the returns. The chart below shows how much you would have lost if you had missed just the 25 best days in the market of the last 45 years.

It’s staggering. Removing just 25 of the 11,620 total days of the past 45 years drops the annual return from 6.7% to 3.4% – and drops the total return from 1,910% to 341%.

If you’re frequently jumping in and out of the market, there’s a good chance you missed all or most of the top 25. (How you unknowingly did this to yourself will be clearer in a minute.)

Now, the other side of the timing fallacy: the worst days. Here’s a comparison of what your returns would have looked like if you had somehow managed to miss the market’s worst days over the past 45 years:

As the chart demonstrates, if you had magically missed the market’s worst days since 1970, your returns would have exceeded 12,000%.

Completely unrealistic, I know. No one can guess which will be the 25 best days and they certainly can’t guess which will be the worst days.