We all know that, on a basic level, profiting off the market means buying low and selling high. Yet it's challenging to confidently know when is the best time to pull the trigger. The market moves fast. The latest example of this was last Thursday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average went on a breakneck 1,500-point rollercoaster ride over the course of a day.

Long-term investors, of course, know that the best way to handle such situations is to not pay a lot of heed to them. Rather, investors should find great companies and buy in at a good time and hold on to the stock until the money is needed for something else. Paying attention to big price swings is useful mostly to determine those opportunistic times to "buy low."

To do this, it helps to have a plan in place before the market retreats, for two simple reasons:

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Source Fool.com