In the middle of this week's market chaos, someone asked Reddit investors a simple question: What are you actually doing right now?

The nine options ranged from "doing nothing" to "shorting the market hard." While informal internet polls aren't scientific, the discussion reveals something useful: the wide range of strategies people employ during corrections, and how those strategies stack up against historical data.

Let's break down the common approaches and what we actually know about what works.

1. Doing nothing (keeping holdings, neither buying nor selling)

This is harder than it sounds psychologically, but the data overwhelmingly supports it for long-term investors. Fidelity famously did a study of their best-performing accounts and found they belonged to people who were either dead or had forgotten they had the account. The message: trying to time the market usually hurts returns.

That said, "doing nothing" only works if you were properly positioned before the selloff. If you were 100% leveraged in tech stocks, doing nothing might mean riding a position down 40%. The strategy assumes you had an appropriate allocation to begin with.

2. Buying as much as humanly possible

The "be greedy when others are fearful" crowd. History is kind to this approach—buying during drawdowns has worked in every past crisis, eventually. The catch is the word eventually. The 2008 financial crisis took five years to recover. Japan's 1989 bubble still hasn't recovered 35 years later. If you bought aggressively in March 2000, you waited 13 years to break even.

The data says buying dips works, but timing matters more than bulls admit. And you need the financial and psychological ability to hold through potentially years of being underwater.

3. Have sold and staying out completely

Selling everything and going to cash feels safe, and sometimes it is. The problem is you then face two timing decisions instead of one: when to sell and when to buy back in. Most people get at least one wrong. Studies by Morningstar and Dalbar consistently show that investor returns lag fund returns by 2-3% annually, primarily because of poorly timed exits and entries.

The other issue: if you sold this week, you already locked in losses. The time to go to cash was before the selloff, not during it.

4. Have liquidated 50% or more, hoping for a lower entry

This is a partial timing bet. It limits your downside if you're right, but it also means you're only half-invested if you're wrong and markets recover. The historical data on partial profit-taking is mixed—it reduces both risk and returns. Whether that trade-off is worth it depends on your age, risk tolerance, and time horizon.

5. Mostly invested but have 15-30% cash, DCA-ing more than usual

This approach has research support. Keeping a cash buffer for opportunistic buying (sometimes called "dry powder") allows you to take advantage of volatility without making all-or-nothing bets. Studies show that rebalancing into weakness—buying what's down to maintain target allocations—has historically added 0.5-1% to annual returns.

The key is discipline: you have to actually buy when things feel terrible.

6. Haven't touched holdings, keep DCA-ing with a fixed amount

This is the "set it and forget it" strategy, and the data loves it. Regular contributions through dollar-cost averaging removes emotion from the equation. You buy more shares when prices are low, fewer when they're high. Over decades, this smooths out volatility and captures long-term growth.

The drawback: it's boring, and it feels passive during exciting market moves. But boring usually wins in investing.

7. Day trading / swing trading / options, not holding long-term positions

The data here is brutal: the vast majority of active traders underperform buy-and-hold investors after fees and taxes. A study of Taiwan's stock market (where they have complete trading records) found that 80% of day traders lose money, and the 20% who profit do so by taking money from the 80% who don't.

Some skilled traders make money, but if you have to ask whether you're one of them, you probably aren't.

8. Using recovery days to sell small parts of positions, waiting for lower entry

This is tactical rebalancing, and it can work if you're disciplined. The risk is you end up market-timing by accident—selling on strength and waiting for weakness that may not come. This strategy requires being right repeatedly, which is harder than being right once.

9. Shorting the market hard

Shorting is a legitimate strategy, but it's expensive (you pay borrowing costs) and risky (losses are theoretically unlimited). Even if you're right about direction, you can be wrong about timing and get wiped out. Long-term, the market goes up more than down, so shorting fights the trend.

Professional short sellers exist and some do well, but most are hedging other positions, not making pure directional bets.

So what should you do?

The research points to a few evidence-based principles:

• Have an asset allocation that lets you sleep at night before volatility hits • Rebalance mechanically toward your targets during drawdowns • Keep contributing regularly regardless of market conditions • Avoid making dramatic changes based on fear or greed • Recognize that market timing usually adds cost, not value

None of this is exciting. None of it feels clever. But the data says it works better than the alternatives.