The reality when it comes to investing is that, like Las Vegas, the odds are stacked in the house’s favor. That means that ordinary, individual investors are often at a significant disadvantage to the professional investors, the people who live and breathe and turn ridiculously high profits for both themselves and the financial firms that employ them.

In fact, most people realize this. It is why so many of us feel that the best time to sell a particular security is when we buy it and the best to buy a security is when we actually sell it. Many of us feel that if other investors did the exact opposite of what we do, they would prosper… simply because we never make the right decisions. Period.

And this makes a bit of sense. It is human nature to buy during euphoric market periods - we feel safer investing in something that is rising than we are in something that is falling with no bottom in sight (how many of us actually pumped our hard-earned money into the market in March of 2009 as the markets showed no mercy? Kudos to those who did!).

There is one way to beat those odds, though. And, for the most part, this strategy can be combined with mutual funds and other low-cost investment alternatives that allow you to enjoy proper investment diversification, professional asset selection and management and other benefits that, as individual investors, we cannot afford to complete ourselves.

This strategy is the one known in the industry as Dollar Cost Averaging. It can turn even the most unlucky investor into a superstar, and the premise of how this actually works is quite simple.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of Dollar Cost Averaging, the idea is that investors will make regular, fixed contributions to an investment account. With mutual funds, it allows the investor to purchase different unit amounts for the same dollar amount of money. For example, investing $300 per month might allow 100 units one month, but just 75 the next.

The reason Dollar Cost Averaging works is that investors are buying so frequently that their average unit cost gets averaged over the course of their investment period. This means that even the unluckiest investor of all of us will buy at the average instead of at the absolute highest point available. And the best part is that, as markets continue to rise over the long-term, even those “bad” days in the short-term turn into the “best” days in the long term.

Using Dollar Cost Averaging to reduce your investment costs makes a great deal of sense for every investor who knows, either first-hand or theoretically, that accurate market timing is impossible.

Get More Investment Strategy Tips and Advice at MutualFundSite.org. Chris has more than 17 years of financial services experience. He currently manages a website about Cheap Rims For Sale at CheapRimsForSale.com.