I have one thing going on in my mind for quite long i.e. DCA is also a form of lump sum investment. Like if a person is investing 10$ per week then he is like investing a lump sum of 10$ in week one and then a lump sum 10$ in week two and so on. DCA is also a kind of accumulation of Lump Sum investment that are made over a period of time. It's my own interpretation, it may or may not be correct.
You also have a valid point that anyone who invested a huge money several years ago and is ignorant about Bitcoin that he didn't invest at later stage, such are just hypothetical assumptions. The person who is inve. sting a lump sum money into bitcoin is well aware about Bitcoin and will continue to invest in Bitcoin over a period of time.
Okay, so you're saying DCA is like making a bunch of small, separate lump sums. Kinda true, but it's different. Lump sum is ONE big investment. DCA is many small ones, spread out. It's like the difference between dumping a bucket of water all at once versus slowly pouring a glass at a time. Both get you water, but DCA is less risky. Anyone who put a load of cash in Bitcoin years back probably knows the deal and is likely still adding to it, just like you should be. It's all about stacking sats, whether big or small.
Yes, it is fair to say that DCA can also indirectly be said to be a lump sum purchase. Because quite a lot of people don't have a lot of cold or free money and invest bitcoins with the DCA method every week. This could actually be said to be a lump sum purchase at that point. Because basically the person no longer has any cash because he invested it in bitcoin that week. Maybe next week the person will get more money, because let's say the person who invested in DCA gets a weekly salary. However, because this person routinely buys bitcoin every week, this can be said to be DCA.
Because basically, after I researched further what DCA is, it turns out that DCA is like saving money. However, quite a few also think that in carrying out DCA we have to collect the same amount of money at each allocation time. So if you look at these factors, when doing DCA we are required to have a fixed income and the same expenses to continue to have a regular discretionary income. But I wouldn't worry about this, because the most important thing is if we do DCA on bitcoin. While we have cold money we continue to accumulate that cold money into bitcoin.
And talking about a lump sum purchase, I think if you say it's a one-time investment. Maybe this is true, but if for example that person regularly buys Bitcoin, I think that person could be said to be doing DCA too. So basically the purchasing method when investing in bitcoin can be said to have the same thing. But still there are differences.
For sure, as you are suggesting, there are several ways that lump sum and DCA are quite similar, especially if a guy might manually employ DCA every week and also if the guy might go through a bit of a process in regards to how to divide up his weekly DCA allowance in terms of figuring how much BTC to buy and perhaps how to maximize his BTC investment amount. There are people who also set their weekly DCA in automated ways, and perhaps for some people automated works better in terms of their being able to carry out other things in life and also not to forget to do their weekly DCA, since it is automatic. I personally prefer manual DCA, yet for sure I can understand why a person would set automatic DCA so that they don't have to spend time manually doing it -or run the risk of forgetting to do it.
Sometimes we like to consider some surprise amount of income as having potential for lump sum, yet if we already have a practice of investing all of our extra income into bitcoin then even if we get some extra amount, then it may well not be any different from DCA in the way that we decide to buy right away with it. Surely whenever we have extra income (or even receive some surprise, like a bonus), we may well want to consider our various options besides just buying BTC right away with it, and we might choose to defer by structuring DCA's out into the future with that amount and/or structuring buy on dips with some of the amount. None of these considerations are bad, as long as we can recognize/appreciate the tradeoffs that are involved with each of them, and there is almost no way to get a perfect outcome, except just to attempt to tailor what we do to our own individual preferences, which sometimes we might not even know our preferences until after we sit down and ponder on what it is that we want to do with the extra (perhaps surprise) lump sum that came into us.
Let's say, for example, we are used to investing $100 per week, and we have been investing into bitcoin with this strategy for a couple of years. Suddenly we receive a surprise bonus for $5k, and if we had not known that we were going to get it, it could take us several days to figure out how we are going to want to allocate such extra money, and perhaps we will consider that extra $5k to be equal to a whole year of DCA, and even if we think of the possibility of allocating all of that extra money to bitcoin and dividing the amount into three parts, such as DCA, buy right away and buy on dip, we also might not be be sure either how we want to do it and if that is what we want to do... so sometimes we might even question our own priorities, yet we still are likely advantaged by our knowing about bitcoin and having had already established a bitcoin investing system, since if we had not known about bitcoin, we might have had ended up being more wasteful in regards to how we would have had ended up allocating our surprise bonus $5k.
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Of course setting an emergency fund is very important during this process, because is only when we don't have any other option apart from our bitcoin investment that we can be tempted to sell after a short term of investing in bitcoin, those investors who are well prepared to go into bitcoin investment will first of all build up their emergency fund before they can start accumulating.
reason is because they don't want a process whereby after investing to an extent maybe something very emergency just pop up you know at this point you will be Left with only one option that's to sell your bitcoin to figure it out. However, as a bitcoin investor building up your emergency fund should be the first thing you need to consider before accumulating so as to avoid selling our bitcoin within a short term.
If you attempt to consider matters from a more realistic and practical way, there is no reason to build up an emergency fund prior to investing into bitcoin, since your emergency fund would not be protecting anything, since if you build it first, then by definition you have no bitcoin, so you don't have anything to protect.
Of course, you can choose to do whatever you want, and so depending on the status of your finances, there are likely many people who are in a position to get started buying bitcoin as soon as possible, and I would think that even poor people may well already have 2-6 weeks of cash that they float so that they are able to pay bills and/or any expenses that they have between pay periods. Yeah, sure they likely have times where they have more of a cash cushion and other times that are lower, but still I think that it is reasonable to expect that an overwhelming majority of folks keep some kind of cash float, which justifies getting started with bitcoin sooner rather than fucking around with establishing some pie in the sky emergency fund that just ends up resulting in delaying investing into bitcoin for a year or more.. . and that is just stupid to be delaying when it comes to bitcoin... especially it can take a long ass time, just for a normie to figure out from where he is going to source his coins, and if he finds a place to establish an account on an exchange, that can take time too.. so normie newbies need to get started buying bitcoin right away and without delay, even if they are poor.
On the other hand, if a person has finances that are so messed up that he cannot even figure out if he has discretionary income, then that person needs to make sure that he has discretionary income before buying any bitcoin, since bitcoin should ONLY be bought with discretionary income, not money that is needed for short-term expenses.
Buy the Dip and Hodl, that's the only way. Someone who saw it at 98.5k would think it will fall further as even the media predicted further fall before returning above 100k.
I know you are saying to buy the dip and hold is the only way because of the name of this thread, but do not be deceived by the name of this thread. Buying the dip is not the only way to achieve success in bitcoin investment, and since the name of this thread is to buy the dip and hold, you shouldn't focus only on buying the dip because it will delay you from starting up your bitcoin investment since nobody is certain if the dip will happen today or tomorrow. Since you are a lower coiner, you should focus more on accumulating bitcoin with the DCA strategy so that you would be at an advantage of consistently accumulating bitcoin anytime your money is readily available, which will allow you to accumulate more bitcoin than someone who is using the buying the dip strategy.
Especially for a newbie, planning an investment by buying dips will not be a good plan. Waiting for the dip while inexperienced and newbie will only make you lose buying opportunities. An experienced investor will stay out of this discussion, because he knows when to do what and what action will be right for him. But buying dips for a newbie is just a reason for delay. I never advise a newbie to buy dips, because this advice will only keep a newbie away from investing and maybe he will be deprived of investment.
When you are new or inexperienced in investing, I will advise you to invest in the DCA strategy. DCA gives you the opportunity to invest without any delay and allows you to enter at all moments of the market. You do not have to be experienced or wait for the right time to invest in this method. There is no specific time to invest in DCA, whenever you have investable money, you can buy and hold it for a long time. To buy a dip, you have to watch the market and wait for it to buy, which is a waste of time.
It is not just wrong for newbies investors alone to wait for a dip before they buy, even veterans too, it doesn't matter wether you are a newbie investors or not, it is absolutely wrong to wait for a dip before making a purchase of Bitcoin especially when your stash of Bitcoin is not good enough to wait, those investors that has gone far in their accumulating journey can have the leverage of waiting for a dip, but it's not ideal, because they know that they can miss a lot of buying opportunities too, but due to how far they have gone in their accumulation of Bitcoin, it wouldn't be much of a disaster but those that are just getting started, those that has less or no stash at all, waiting would really be a terrible idea.
So the best thing to do wether you are a newbie investors or a veteran investor, is to buy Bitcoin regardless of it present price, but if in the process the price dip further, you can buy aggressively only if you have the financial leverage to do so, but waiting for the dip is what I really don't find encouraging.
You are largely correct that the circumstances for a newbie investor may not be a whole hell of a lot different from even an experienced bitcoin investor, especially if the experienced bitcoin investor has not reached a very good accumulation status and maybe he realized that he has been too whimpy in his historical bitcoin investment, so surely he would likely need to just continue with his DCA and maybe even increase his level of aggressiveness based on his historical whimpiness in buying bitcoin.
Let's say that there is a guy in his mid-to-late 30s, and perhaps he had spent around 10 years investing in various non-bitcoin investments prior to coming to bitcoin 6 years ago, and perhaps the guy had quite a bit of potential to invest into bitcoin at $500 per week, yet instead he ONLY invested
$100 per week, and so he ended up investing nearly $32k over the past 6 years, and he ONLY has slightly less than 2 BTC, and so he might realize that he made a mistake by being too whimpy, so he may well have to continue DCAing or maybe even to increase his DCA amount.
Surely the same guy who had been more aggressive, and perhaps he invested
$500 per week for the past 6 years, and so he ended up investing $157k into bitcoin, yet he also has 5x more bitcoin with right around 9.3 BTC in his BTC stash. And so the second guy might be starting to feel that he had invested enough into bitcoin and even more than enough, even though his BTC stack is not quite to the point that he can quit his job. So the second guy might start to go through a bit of a dilemma in regards to whether he should continue to invest into bitcoin with the same level of aggressiveness, or maybe he might want to either stop DCAing or or slow down DCAing or maybe somehow to change his strategy.
I am not going to say that I know the answer for either of these guys, especially since each of them is in a better position as compared with the newbie who has hardly any BTC, yet the second one would be more justifiable to let off on the level of his aggressiveness in investing into bitcoin. Perhaps the first guy needs to increase his aggressiveness rather than decreasing it or stopping it... and sometimes we might not realize our mistakes or our luck, and some of our luck or our mistakes may well relate back to how aggressively we might have had been in our earlier years of BTC accumulation, and we might not really be in a position to measure where we are at until after a whole cycle or perhaps 2 cycles.
Buy the Dip and Hodl, that's the only way. Someone who saw it at 98.5k would think it will fall further as even the media predicted further fall before returning above 100k.
I know you are saying to buy the dip and hold is the only way because of the name of this thread, but do not be deceived by the name of this thread. Buying the dip is not the only way to achieve success in bitcoin investment, and since the name of this thread is to buy the dip and hold, you shouldn't focus only on buying the dip because it will delay you from starting up your bitcoin investment since nobody is certain if the dip will happen today or tomorrow. Since you are a lower coiner, you should focus more on accumulating bitcoin with the DCA strategy so that you would be at an advantage of consistently accumulating bitcoin anytime your money is readily available, which will allow you to accumulate more bitcoin than someone who is using the buying the dip strategy.
That is not the only way you can earn profits from BTC, but if you want to earn a big profit from BTC, buy dip and sell when the price is very high in the market, which is the only way you can achieve such massive profits from BTC because it will allow you not to sell in the low price until the high price occur before you can sell to earn massive profits.
If they are not financial buoyant, I guess waiting for the dip is the best option for such category of investors to buy BTC from the market because it will help them to buy plenty of BTC and hodl for the price of their desire to come before they can visit the market to earn profit. But if you want to use DCA to accumulate BTC, make sure you are financial buoyant because there is nothing that will make you sell your BTC in a short term than to continue to buy in the dip to accumulate BTC in your portfolio.
Even though members seem to get sucked into the idea of buying the dip for the purpose of selling, we are not talking about trading in this thread. And, surely many of us have come to understand how distracting it can become to buy the dip, even though personally I have no problem with guys wanting to buy the dip in order to buy more bitcoin with the same quantity of money.... but yeah, guys still get distracted into trading ideas rather than long term accumulating, and perhaps in the whole scheme of things, whether we bought on the dip or just bought regularly, there might not be a lot of differences in regards to the total BTC stash later down the road when we might get to a point of actually starting to withdraw from our stash.. if we are not trading, then do we transition into some kind of withdrawal after a whole cycle? a couple of cycles? more than a couple of cycles? When and how we transition can truly depend on how long it might end up taking a guy to get to a BTC accumulation level (or status) in which transitioning is starting to make sense from his own perspective and BTC accumulation level circumstances.