Of course, there is nothing wrong with tailoring your BTC accumulation strategy to your own situation, and it is likely much better to do so.  One of the reasons that I continue harp upon DCA as the best of strategies is because it can help to get newbies started right away, and it is also a very good strategy for people who have been in bitcoin for a long time but just do not want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to do in terms of buying on dip or lump sum investing, and it is also amongst the better ways to NOT run out of cash because the DCA strategy should be applied in amounts that fit with the budget of the BTC accumulator and maybe tweaked from time to time when cashflow changes happen or other relevant changes happen in personal circumstances.

It can take a whole hell of a lot of time to merely figure out what would be a good DCA amount and frequency, because ultimately NO one should be investing in bitcoin or anything else if they have not sufficiently figured out their personal circumstances, including how much extra cash that they have available on monthly basis to be able to invest in bitcoin or anything else.

Don't get me wrong, I am asserting that it is a very important thing for every investor to figure out their personal circumstances prior to investing anything, but at the same time, I am not proclaiming that the perfect should be the enemy of the good, and so many times there will be situations in which a person can get started investing in bitcoin right away prior to figuring out their personal details... and so DCA would be good with those kinds of situations too.. and in the meantime as they get started investing some amount that they can ballparkedly assess to be ok..  they can adjust their amount and their strategy later after they get a chance to figure out their finances a bit better, and at the same time, figuring out personal financial circumstances is likely an ongoing thing that can be learned, applied and tweaked on a regular basis.  I have been doing it for more than 30 years, and I am still learning how to do it better and to make various adjustments from time to time.

Regarding your point about preferring buying on dips, there can be some truth that buying on dips works out better for you, and maybe that has to do with your having had already accumulated some BTC and so you are feeling less urgency (or maybe flexibility is a better way of saying it) in reaching various accumulation goals that you have.  For sure one of the risks of attempting to be too smart in trying to time the dips is that sometimes the dips that you expect to happen do not happen, and then you might get fucked because you are holding on to way more fiat than you would have had preferred to be holding onto.

As long as you know the trade offs in regards to waiting for dips, then there is no problem with your continuing to prioritize such buying on dips approach.

Another way to deal with the dilemma is to set various maximum holding of fiat thresholds, and that would most likely depend on your circumstances - including how many BTC you have already accumulated - but you could say to yourself that you will hold up to $5k for buying on dips and if you accumulate more than $5k, then you are going to buy with that extra amount.  So then at that point, you will be attempting to take into account that if the BTC price goes up rather than down, you may well still be holding that $5k and the price might never come back down, and you can consider for yourself if that would be an amount that you would be o.k. to keep in fiat.. in the event that the price never comes back down.

You can likely appreciate from my example that each of us are likely to establish different price amounts that we might be willing to hold depending on how much BTC that we already have accumulated, how much BTC we have already bought within a certain price range in which we still might be moving, and including considering each of the other individual factors that I had already mentioned and will likely be different for each of us.  In other words, there is no exact correct answer, but there might be some balances and tradeoffs that are smarter than others... and those are within the discretion of each of is to figure if we have done enough work on strategizing what we are going to do on a regular basis versus what are we going to do if the BTC price goes up or down.


I looked at your forum registration date and you have been registered on the forum for nearly as long as me.

Accordingly, it is not easy to answer the question for you more than my attempting to provide some examples, and you are surely free to share some of your circumstances (you do not need to give any exact numbers that disclose a lot of personal details, and you can also present a kind of hypothetical person too), and if we work with some details then it might be easier to attempt to describe some of the tradeoffs - because surely the strategy that a person who has been into bitcoin for a while might be different from a newbie, but sometimes some people who have been into bitcoin for a long time have failed/refused to sufficiently and adequately focus on their BTC accumulation strategy, so sometimes guys/gals in those situations may well be better served by attempting to employ a strategy that is more like they are a newbie because they have not been very successful in terms of accumulating a meaningful and substantial BTC stash that even feels like enough for their own perceptions of their circumstances.

We could create a hypothetical person to discuss, and we can use round numbers.  If we say that the hypothetical person had $100k quasi-liquid investment portfolio, and then the question might be what is the target level to have in BTC? 

Prior to March 2020, I used to suggest having 1% to 10% in BTC, but after March 2020, I started to recommend aiming to have 1% to 25% in BTC, but you still have to choose a specific number that you want to shoot for depending on if you are whimpy about bitcoin or you are bullish about bitcoin, and if you are whimpy then you would shoot for the lower end of the range and if you are bullish about bitcoin, then you would shoot for reaching the higher end of the range.

When I got into bitcoin in late 2013, I had not really figured out what my BTC target accumulation was going to be, but after I was into BTC for about a year, by late 2014, I figured out that my target level was going to be 10%, so I largely met my 10% target by late 2014, yet if you might recall, the price of BTC was pretty damned low throughout 2015, so by the time the end of 2015 came, I had ended up continuing to buy BTC and I ended up reaching something like a 13.5% BTC allocation level in terms of my then total quasi-liquid investment portfolio.  Once I reached my target, my strategies changed, so there sometimes can be difficulties for guys to either get to their BTC accumulation target level, and then maybe there still might be some need to change their target level goal in order to tailorize their BTC accumulation target level to their own situation that they might perceive themself as being quite a bit more informed about their own situation after they had gotten close to or surpassed their first goal.. so once they reach their first goal, they end up rethinking their goal and to start to believe that maybe their goal should be something different than what it had previously been.


There are a couple of things that I do that seem to be helpful on this point.  First, I have had a tendency to project my cashflows out a couple of years in advance on an Excel spreadsheet, so I can see how much much money I have available for investing into bitcoin on a monthly basis.  Second, when I first got into bitcoin in late 2013, I had given myself a 6 month budget that was a certain amount of money, and I divided that amount by 26 in order to give myself a weekly allowance.  Each week I tried to strategize buying on dips, but if I had not spent the whole amount of my allowance by the end of the week, then I would just buy at whatever price just to make sure that I spent that allowance amount for the week.

During my spare time for those first six months, I tried to study the application of my own strategy, and also to study happenings in bitcoin, and when the end of the first 6 months started coming close, I pretty much authorized myself a similar sized budget for the subsequent 6 months... and so by the time the end of the second six months came, that's when I figured out that my target was going to be 10%, even though I ended up going up to 13.5%-ish by the end of 2015.   I made some other changes to my BTC approach in mid-to-late 2015 too, but those mid-to-late 2015 changes to my BTC approach had to do with my having had already been studying the matter (and my own particulars) for more than a year and a half...
 

Yes.. your approach will surely need to be modified in order to attempt to account for your particulars including but not limited to how many BTC you had already accumulated, and also considering what kinds of targets that you would like to reach.  Perhaps the psychology will kind of take care of itself if you establish a solid plan, but I will assure you that there are frequently going to be situations in which there are uncertainties regarding how to make sure that you are attempting to address both the financial matters and the psychology too.

I believe that I have learned NOT to panic as easily as I had previously, and I believe that I have been fairly successful in that direction, but still there can be circumstances in which BTC price performance (including various extremes) can end up testing your psychology and even realizing that if you reassess the situation and change some of your planned strategies, then you will feel a lot better...  For example, this last time around, after BTC price dropped below $35k in early May-ish, it seems that I had to readjust my plans at leas 5-6 times, and usually (in recent times) I do not tend to change my plans very frequently, but BTC prices ended up going down way further beyond extremes points that many of us expected (including yours truly). 

One of the risks, and maybe even stressful points of being involved in investing in such a volatile asset like BTC does end up having to go through extremes, and figuring out whether the plan that is already in place is sufficient, or if tweaks might need to be made in order to help financially, and/or psychologically.