I have been on the lookout for what possible DCA calculator I should use, because as a newbie one of the highest worries I have is how to monitor my Bitcoin investment and what DCA record tools I should adopt that can give me total accurate figures of what my profits percentage is and lose also, because I have the intention to invest at a weekly interval and hold my Bitcoin for at least 4 years which is a one bitcoin halves cycle and by then, I should be able to arrive at a balanced ground in terms of Bitcoin accumulation journey based on my total invested funds.
DCA calculators do not tell you how much you will make in the future. They ONLY show past performance, which that does not mean that you would profit in the future.
I think that it is it better to figure out your own formula in terms of investing as much as you feel comfortable, while realizing that you might not gain any money and you also might lose all of it.
For beginners going into bitcoin, you should at least consider the below 9 factors:. .and DCA with small amounts while you are learning is also o.k. in order that you can determine if you would like to become more aggressive, and at the same time it is important to get started sooner rather than later in order that you can get some kind of a start and even getting set up with how you are going to source your buys can take a bit of time to figure out and maybe to adapt along the way, too.
These 9 principle individual factors that influence your decision whether to invest into bitcoin and how to invest into bitcoin have financial, skills and psychological components that include:
1) your cashflow,
2) how much bitcoin you have already accumulated,
3) your other investments (including considering your emergency fund, your float and your reserves - which are usually kinds of liquid ways to hold value in cash, dollars and/or your native currency in away that many of your expenses tend to be denominated),
4) your view of bitcoin as compared with other investment possibilities,
5) your timeline,
6) your risk tolerance,
7) your time, skills, goals (investment/lifestyle targets, which includes figuring out the extent that you are in BTC accumulation, maintenance or liquidation stage),
8 ) your abilities to strategize, plan, research and learn along the way including tweaking strategies from time to time,
9) your considering your time, your abilities and whether to trade, reallocate from time to time, to use of leverage and/or to use financial instruments... (and for sure the use of financial instruments, leverage and margin trading involve higher level skills and are not even necessary to still become richie in bitcoin's already existing asymmetric bet.)
The 9 factors you mentioned are certainly very useful as guidelines for managing finances when investing in Bitcoin. I understand that cash flow is the main basis for us to apply the DCA strategy, which is to manage finances as best as possible to be able to accumulate bitcoins in the investment journey. And maybe we will also consider the price side to enter in the early stages of purchasing. Because lately bitcoin has risen significantly so we have to think whether the DCA move is the best strategy for now if we are too late to use it.
Yes. I agree that it is more challenging to enter into an investment after the price has risen a lot, including if you consider that bitcoin has risen right around 4x since November 2022 or even more than 2x since October 2023.
Nonetheless, as an investor, especially a newbie who might be considering establishing a BTC position, you may well want to make sure that you are prepared for either UP or down, and the ONLY way to prepare for up is to buy some bitcoin. If you do not have any bitcoin, then you are not prepared for UP, and waiting does not constitute being prepared for up.
Now as a newbie if you think that you are some kind of expert or you have some kind of superior knowledge (or hunch) that the BTC price is going to drop, then maybe you would risk waiting, but that seems to be just gambling rather than really being serious about investing.
One of the best strategies for anyone, including newbies, would be to perform some kind of a lump sum investment right away, but then to make sure that he has additional funds (whether from cashflow or just holding back some of the invested amount) to either keep buying no matter what and to also potentially hold back some funds in order to prepare to buy on dips.
One of the problems with lump sum investing and also the situation of a lot of normies is that normies (meaning most normal people) do not have have abilities to lump sum, and that is why DCA tends to be so effective and/or practical. So if there is some cash just coming in on a regular basis and some of that is considered disposable/discretionary income, then you determine how much of that you want to dedicate to investing into bitcoin, and then the question would be whether to invest right away or to hold some of it back for buying on dips.
Another thing is that if someone is new to investing, it well could take 10 years (at 10% invested/saved) to be able to invest up to a year's salary, so it take a whole fucking long time to really build any kind of meaningful portfolio, so if you happen to be someone who is fairly new to investing and you have been investing way less than 10 years, you are probably better off just DCAing most of the amount that you allocate, and perhaps considering whether there might be some value to holding some of that back for buying on dips.
Now if you are someone who has other funds that you can allocate, then that puts you into a situation of someone who can lump sum part of that, and if you are someone who has been investing into bitcoin for several years, then you also might have the luxury of letting off on your DCA in these price territories, but it still may not necessarily make sense to let off on your BTC accumulation unless you have figured out some strategies in which you have already assessed that you have accumulated enough BTC or that you have over accumulated. If you are not able to make those kinds of determinations, then it probably would be better to just continue buying BTC regularly until you reach such status. .and that is surely and truly under your own criteria that you would reach such an assessment about your own situation.
If you are merely looking at the current BTC price move, that is only one of the factors, and surely, you might consider that there are better places to put your money - even though personally, it seems like a problematic determination, especially if you have already assessed that you have neither reached sufficient/adequate BTC accumulation or overaccumulation.
Apart from that, if you have collected BTC throughout your investment journey. Do you still do DCA when the price of Bitcoin has recorded its highest price? or it is better to wait for the correction and buy all at once and start over to set the dca when the price has gone down.
Of course, if you have spent a considerable amount of time accumulating BTC, then you may well have reached a status of either accumulating enough BTC or even having had over accumulated BTC, so you have more options once you reach those kinds of assessments.. and since you have been registered on this forum for nearly 9 years, since April 2015, you have had a lot of opportunities to accumulate bitcoin throughout the last 9 years, yet at the same time, you likely realize that bitcoin currently is not really in a position of being overly valued - especially considering what happened in the last couple of years and the significant amount of ongoing existent and persistent buying pressures coming from a lot of new categories of buyers, and also including that BIG financial institutions are now starting to market their products that would require that they are backed by actual bitcoin rather than paper bitcoin.
So you should be attempting to account for actual factors that involve assessments of BTC price and whether you might consider that bitcoin has higher price potential from here. You are responsible for coming to your own assessments that would involve how many BTC you believe is sufficient and adequate preparation for up.. and yeah always trying to be prepared financially and psychologically for the BTC price to move in either direction in the short to medium term, while at the same time keeping your eye on the prize, in the event that you actually are able to understand what makes bitcoin valuable and likely more valuable than any other asset currently in existence... and you don't even have to believe all of those kinds of bullish ideas in order to figure out your own allocations and how much you need to assure that you are prepared for either and both possible BTC price directions at the same time based on your assessing the particulars and viewpoints of each of your own assessments of the 9 factors.
Another thing is that it can take a lot of practice to really get some kind of balance in your own life in terms of assessing the 9 factors so that you end up being comfortable with your own allocation choices, including the extent to which you might feel that you want to approach bitcoin with a whimpy approach or a more aggressive approach, and maybe also assessing if you want to allocate somewhere between 5% to 25% of your investment into bitcoin and so 5% would be on the more whimpy side and 25% would be on the more aggressive side, but you can ONLY afford to be aggressive if you have done some of the necessary studying of your own circumstances. Of course you are free to go outside of that range, but the 5% to 25% is an initial starting point to figure out where you might fall within that recommended starting range.