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.
Yes it was an adjustment I bought when it dip some time ago and until now still doing it will still I want more to save BTC in any way including the DCA strategy, maybe I have known for a long time about this but I don't feel how this can be done accumulated with my finances but if I have agreed to it, it means that I am ready in the sense that the DCA strategy is carried out and buying Dips is still valid for my investment then this is a little impressive, isn't it? Regarding my finances, of course there are adjustments in the sense that I have to be able to do this and try it.
Of course lump sum is going to do better if the price goes up and does not go back down, and it will also do better if you have some kind of idea that the price is going to go down, but I would wager that an overwhelming majority of us really do not know, and after the fact sometimes we might end up kicking ourselves as if we "should have known" but the fact of the matter is that we really cannot know BTC price direction with any meaningful degree of certainty.
So, even if you were to take portfolios of people who are trying to time the price versus those who DCA, you are likely going to get better performance with the DCA.. and even if you believe that you can beat a regular DCA approach, you have to account for your time too.. and in that regard, sure you might consider that it is fun to practice figuring out the BTC price movement in order to time the dips, if any, but you can still play around with attempting to buy the dips while DCAing at the same time... You would just not be using your whole budget for buying dips, merely a fraction of your budget would be used for buying dips.. and you can determine how much of a fraction you would like that to be - even if you appreciate that maybe it is better to not be wasting too much of your time and just make yourself buy regularly. .and maybe hold back on over stragetizing and/or over thinking the matter..
I looked at your forum registration date and you have been registered on the forum for nearly as long as me.
I've been on this forum for a long time, but I haven't been active for several years for personal reasons, while investing in bitcoin I never forget and I do it every time I have money.
My portfolio is still holding up despite being inactive here.
Well, if we consider that you could have employed a DCA strategy throughout that time, and even invested a relatively small amount of
$10 per week for the past 8 years which would have added up to about $4,180 invested, and would have gotten you nearly 4 BTC, and of course, if you had been able to take a bit more of an aggressive stance, then you could have invested 10x that amount at $100 per week and you would have invested $41,800 and would have gotten about 40 BTC during that same time. So DCA can be very powerful, even with relatively modest amounts invested on an ongoing and regular basis.
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.
Notes in Excel spreadsheets are important, when I start investing in bitcoin I always record it there, for example I bought bitcoin at a price of $24,655 on Sunday so I never go through this because it is important to know the money invested every month and can accumulate the average value of his purchases to make it easier.
But the record is still lacking in 1 year but I still keep it.
For sure, Excel can be used in very powerful ways to keep track and also to attempt to project various future scenarios including attempting to plan various strategies that might work decently well and to account for various alternative scenarios and to figure out if the strategy might need to be tweaked at certain time points if it can be determined that one scenario direction might be playing out versus another scenario direction.. and you can surely also get something directionally correct, but then not really be sure about the time frame for it to play out or the magnitude in which it might play out within certain time parameters that you have highlighted for yourself.
I have a thread in which I had gone over various kinds of timeline scenarios, and of course, my frameworks do not comprehend all possibilities, but it fleshes out some of the techniques that I attempt to employ and shows some of my ways of thinking about long term investing in bitcoin.
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).
For this I am also the same when I buy high suddenly the price drops I don't feel panic anymore I tend to be more persistent and don't see the market or any news but I always see history that bitcoin can rise again.
Psychologically it is important for adjustment to realize that we can get through when the period of increase comes, here I only see when the price goes down that I return to the market again.
For sure there are a variety of ways to attempt to play the BTC price moves, even when they go against your expectations, which could merely be having some extra cash available to buy more, of if you have run out of cash then maybe to wait out the correction period as you suggested, and surely some of us who have some cashflow might still be able to benefit from BTC price corrections that go beyond our expectations because maybe ever two weeks or so we are able to get more money and be able to buy more BTC with a portion of our pay that we may have allocated for such buying of BTC purposes.