You have an extra $10k that you can invest into bitcoin, and you are a newbie, and you are suggesting that you DCA the $10k that you currently have?

What is the exact hypothetical?

Let's say that the person is brand new to bitcoin, and maybe he is in his late 20s, and he has an income that is around $30k per year, and he had been investing for the past few years in non-bitcoin investments.. maybe he has $10k in his various investments, but then he also has an additional $10k for some reason that he came across.  Maybe he had been investing into bitcoin already for around 6 months, since the beginning of 2025 at $100 per week, and he plans to continue to invest $100 per week into bitcoin into the future.

So then what is he going to do with the extra $10k that he has?  There are three categories. Invest right away, DCA and buy on dips. It seems logical that he at least considers all three categories, even if he has preferences in regards to one or another, yet $10k is divisible so he does not have to put all of it into one category, even while at the same time there is no requirement that he has to use all three categories - even though there seems to be some logic in terms of using all three categories.

If the guy looks at his current bitcoin holdings, he had invested right around $3,100 into bitcoin since the beginning of the year, so he had accumulated right around 0.032 BTC.. and so the fact that he already has a plan and a practice of accumulating bitcoin at aroudn $100 per week, that amount seems to be working for his current income situation.

Of course, another thing that he could do is to shore up some of his emergency funds and his reserve funds, if he might feel that they are not up to his comfort level, and if we might estimate that his monthly expenses are somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,700, then if he wants to have at least 3 months in his emergency funds, that would be right around $5,100 for his emergency funds..


In my supplement of the hypothetical the guy is already employing DCA, and he is not adjusting the DCA based on perceptions if the BTC price is high or low, but instead he is investing based on his being new to bitcoin and his wanting to build up a bitcoin stash for the next 4 years or more. Holding back on DCA seems problematic, and waiting to buy dips seems problematic. He has all three categories in regards to the $10k, and if you are suggesting to put $3k to $5k right now, and then wait with the remainder.. but then to stop with his DCA.. that surely seems problematic... which you seem to be betting more on down, even though you are not giving any evidence to show that you are actually sufficiently/adequately prepared for up.. and from my consideration, if you are not sufficiently/adequately prepared for up, then you likely have to keep buying in some kind of way, even if you hold back some of the value for buying dips... and of course, there is no one right answer, even though surely you can hardly say that you are continuing to invest in bitcoin if you stop or lighten up on your DCA merely because you had used $3k to $5k (which is only 30-50%) of the extra funds (the $10k) to buy bitcoin right away.
 

Fair enough... even though you seem to be suggesting contradictroy actions that involve continuing DCA (at what level?) and cutting down on DCA at the same time... So maybe you can clarify what you mean in regards to presuming that you are going to be able to buy more at lower prices, which there is really no way to know if the BTC price will go lower, even if some of us still might purposefully choose to hold back some value to be able to buy some level of dips or maybe if we are largely doing BTC accumulation on a weekly basis, then we will consider that whatever dip might happen, then if we are buying every week, then we are still likely to catch some portion of any dip that might happen through our weekly buys and there might not even be any great justification to hold back any extra value for buying more on the dip when we are already buying bitcoin every week no matter the price... and surely even within the weekly buys, we might try to see if we can identify some dip prices within each of our weekly buys.. to the extent feasible.


You were saying to just keep buying DCA and don't get focused on the price, and then you start to proclaim some kind of benefit in regards to buying more aggressively on dips.

I am not opposed to holding back some value for buying extra on dips, yet there are trade offs with that strategy, and I doubt that it is helpful to change our level of aggressiveness based on BTC price changes, rather than changing our level of aggressiveness based on how solid our cashflow management is..

In other words, we should be able to set up systems that allow for some holding back of value for buying on potential dips, yet the more that we strategize the dips, the more likely we would be employing waiting strategies rather than buying strategies, which I have difficulties considering waiting strategies to capture the idea of what it means to be attempting to be accumulating bitcoin aggressively.

There is ONLY so much that we can do, and if we get so preoccupied about certain level of dips, that no longer seems like investing or even a reasonably measured way to attempt to employ aggressiveness in our bitcoin accumulation practices.

I am not even claiming the answers are easy or that there is any one correct answer since many of us likely prefer to accumulate as much bitcoin as we can, yet we cannot necessarily presume that the BTC price will drop from whatever price location that we are in.


This all makes sense.  We are not likely going to catch any exact dip, even if we are buying weekly, even though we might buy around such dip, and in the whole scheme of things, it may not really matter very much if we were able to buy our extra $100 of the week at $113k or at $116k, even if we would have had preferred to buy that one at $113k rather than $116k, yet if we have 5-10 years of BTC accumulating, we might have had more than 250 purchases over 5 years and more than 500 purchases over 10 years, and sure there might have had been times that we could have had gotten more bitcoin for our money, yet over the 10 years, we likely never knew with any level of confidence whether the BTC price would be going up, down or sideways, especially within short-to-medium time frames..


Quite a few things within the personal factors could have subtle differences even if there may appear to be similarities.


Suggesting that investors to invest only what they can afford to lose is standard advice that applies to both investing and to trading, since there is no guarantee in either investing or trading, even if we might consider that trading brings higher levels of risk than investing due to the practice of getting in and out of positions more frequently with expectations that there are abilities to time markets and to profit from such timing which might work 9/10ths of the time, and then cause the loss of all profits on the 1/10 of times that it does not work within anticipated parameters.


That is not true.  A longer time frame allows for time to play out, and so more things can end up happening over time - even though longer time frames does tend to lessen the impact of short-term volatility, especially if the asset (such as bitcoin) ends up having sufficiently strong fundamentals in order to trend upwards in price into the future as it had been trending upwards in the past.  Past performance does not guarantee future results, so we are largely engaging in an asymmetric bet that involves the most that we can lose is 100% of what we put into bitcoin as long as we don't engage in leveraging, then we are limited to losing 100%, yet at the same time, there continue to be decently good odds that are bitcoin returns will equal or exceed other places that we could have had been putting such value during that time.