David Moyes is wary of following in the footsteps of previous West Ham managers in wasting money on dud strikers this month and has warned that there is a "strong chance" there will be no new arrivals.
The Hammers manager is in the market for a new striker after the sale of Sebastien Haller to Ajax for £20million earlier in the window, with Michail Antonio his only senior striker.
Moyes has spent the last two transfer windows correcting some of the recruitment disasters of the previous regime under Manuel Pellegrini and Mario Husillos. Haller, a club record signing, was sold for just under half the £45million West Ham paid for him, while Felipe Anderson has been sent out on loan to FC Porto and Jack Wilshere - who has now joined Bournemouth in the Championship - left the club in October after his contract of more than £100,000-a-week was terminated mutually.
West Ham have seen a bid for Sevilla's Youssef En-Nesyri fail with the 23-year-old out of their price range. There is also interest in Stade de Reims striker Boulaye Dia and Montpellier's Gaetan Laborde and Moyes said the club have "knocked on the door of three of four really good players".
Moyes has impressed with his transfer business over the last year and while the Hammers are chasing a number of targets, the Scot is keen not to add to the list of strikers who have underwhelmed in east London before. Haller sits atop a considerable pile of failed strikers including Lucas Perez, Simone Zaza and Albian Ajeti, to name a few.
Moyes said: "What I don't want to do, I don't want to spend and waste my money, take a wage up bringing a player in, spend big money and find that actually, I've got it wrong. I'd rather I waited and got someone who might be available in the summer.
"It's difficult to say, but maybe in the past that may well have happened and I'm trying to be correct in as much as I can do. You can't always be correct in what you do, we're always trying to make the right signings and not making the wrong ones. No manager attempts to make a bad signing but I just want to try and make sure that any money I'm spending, because we don't have a big pool of money. We've not got a bundle of money, loads and loads of cash so I'm trying to spend it wisely.
"We've bought well with the likes of [Vladimir] Coufal, [Tomas] Soucek and [Jarrod] Bowen. So I've got to make sure that I'm continually adding players of that ilk.
"Now and again we might have to go and spend big money to get somebody in but if we can't get them then they are not available."
The Hammers have been told they will have to break the bank to land En-Nesyri, who has eight La Liga goals this season on top of four in the Champions League, and are unlikely to be able to afford any deal acceptable to Sevilla.
Moyes confirmed that a bid had been lodged but also warned that, if the right fit cannot be found, there is a strong chance that no one is signed this month.
"He’s not the only one we’ve bid for," said Moyes. "We’ve bid for others. We’ve really knocked on the door of three of four really good players which we think would have helped us if we’d got them. We’ve not been able to do that but we’re trying to keep our business private if we can because we don’t want to speculate on which players we could be signing.
"I’ve tried really hard to get something to add to it. But I’m having to caveat that by saying there’s a strong chance we don’t get anyone, which is the truth."