Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) is a classic investment strategy in which you divide up the total amount you'd like to invest in a particular asset across periodic purchases. You don't care if the price goes up or down; you just buy at regular intervals.

Let's say you have $10,000 you'd like to invest in BTC. Instead of making one lump-sum investment, you spread your purchases across a certain period, say 10 months. This means that every month you will buy $1000 worth of BTC regardless of the price.

What does this do?

1. It helps reduce the impact of volatility (because you won't get tempted to invest more than $10,000 when you see dips). In other words, you avoid the risk of making counter-productive decisions out of fear or greed, such as panic-buying or panic-selling.

2. You may not notice it from your short-term investment activity, but if you zoom out and look at the big picture, you'll see that you have more exposure to dips when you dollar-cost average than when you track for a dip.

3. Let's face it, tracking for a dip is time-consuming and stressful. You could use the time you spend poring over news and charts to manage your other income sources.

However, this strategy only works if the price is generally going up. Like any other strategy, it won't work in a bearish market that has no hope of breaking out.

But at least this way:

1. Your total loss will be smaller.

2. You only lose a portion of the fund you initially intended to invest because you didn't add more in the process.

3. Recovering your losses is also easier if the market is bound to recover.

4. The amount you intended to invest is most likely just a portion of your wealth you can afford to lose, which means you can also afford to wait it out until the market recovers (and not resort to capitulation).

This could have saved or eased the suffering of those who lost their entire life savings on assets that crashed in the recent bear.