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For example, let's say I start investing in Bitcoin in January 2025 and I plan to review the value of my accumulated Bitcoin in 2035. So what if I buy small amounts of Bitcoin regularly during this period? Then, even if the market price fluctuates at different times, it will achieve long-term growth for my investment, because Bitcoin has a long-term price growth trend.
Now suppose, I was trading during this period and sometimes bought Bitcoin and waited for the price to rise, and sometimes sold it immediately when the price fell, then my profit or loss would depend on the short-term market fluctuations. As a result, my risk exposure would be much higher. But, as a long-term investor, if I hold Bitcoin, even if the market drops a little, I will eventually achieve long-term growth.
I have no problem with your anticipation that the trader has a lot more uncertainties as compared with the investor.
Sure, it is possible that the trader could outperform the investor, yet it is way more likely that the trader will underperform the investor. Traders do not tend to fare too well, especially in some something like bitcoin, even though you will hear them bragging their asses off, yet it is quite unlikely that they beat a consistent persistent and aggressive investor who might employ DCA investing and lump sum investing (sure the aggressive investor could also employ buying on dip, yet that is more difficult to measure and starts to devolve into a variation of trading).
Regarding your specific example of 10 years investing, we might be able to control for how much a guy puts in and we might even anticipate raises every year, but let's say if the guy had invested $100 per week, then that would be $5,200 per year and $52k over 10 years, so then we would have a certain amount of certainty about the amount put in, we could likely have various scenarios on an Excel spreadsheet showing various possible BTC price trajectories, and we could get some ideas abut where the guy might be, even though surely we would not know the specifics until the time actually passed as compared with projecting in advance.
Of course, looking back right now from
January 1, 2015 to present, we would have had around $52k invested and 35 BTC. It would be difficult to find a trader who would have had been able to beat those kinds of results with the same amount of capital...even though traders will brag, but when push comes to shove, they would not have had really been able to produce results as compelling as a straight forward DCA approach to BTC.
It seems much more feasible that any of us would be in a much more solid position to engage in persistent, consistent, ongoing and perhaps even aggressive buying of BTC (aka investing) rather than fucking around with trading that may or may not end up working out.
Let's say someone starts buying Bitcoin at a rate of $100 per week starting in January 2015, which is $5,200 per year and a total investment of $52,000 over 10 years. Now if we look at the price of Bitcoin, we can see that there has been quite a bit of change in the price of Bitcoin from 2015 to 2025.
If that person were to sell their holdings in 2025 at the current price of Bitcoin (i.e., $50,000), their total Bitcoin profit would be 35 BTC (on top of their total investment of $52,000). It is important to note here that the outcome of their investment is very clear, as it is possible to know exactly how much they invested each week. [My calculations may be wrong. I got some help from chat-gbt for the calculations. ,
Now, if we talk about a trader trading Bitcoin at the same time, the profit and loss would be very uncertain. A trader may make a temporary profit, but in a volatile market like Bitcoin, the chances of making a consistent profit are very low. As a result, the trader will not be able to earn up to 35 Bitcoins, and even if he makes a good profit once, he may lose more money later.
Now we can see that if the investor had used the DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) method, his returns would have been stable and good, but there are many uncertainties and risks involved in trading, which may not ultimately yield a stable income.