yeah dca saved a lot of people from panic selling at the
bottom, no strategy is more boring and more effective
at the same time
DCA is not necessarily boring, especially if you ongoingly work on your cashflows and figure out ways to increase your aggressiveness.
There could be some "boring" aspect in terms of not needing to give much if any emphasis to bitcoin prices, so for example, maybe a guy has a plan to try to prioritize bitcoin investing, and even though on average he is investing around $100 per week bitcoin, yet some weeks he is able to invest close to $300 into bitcoin (based on his cashflows that week) and other weeks, he is only able to invest around $40 or $50.. even though he might have had set up some side funds so that no matter what he buys $40 per week, and another thing that he did is to set his buys to happen anywhere between Friday and the following Thursday. He tends to get paid on Fridays.. and so he will sometimes strategize his buys within the week (at least when he has time, since some weeks he has several activities on his schedule and he might not have time to manually make his weekly buys).. so if he has a plan that if by Thursday at 8pm, he had not made his weekly buy, he will buy at any price at that time, since on Friday, he will have a new paycheck that comes available.
Maybe he had been carrying out his plans for 6 months, and he has been also building his cashflow management, which is another thing that he considers to be interesting about his carrying out of his cashflow management for the purpose of freeing up more discretionary funds, if he is able to figure out some ways to do it.
What I felt and experienced while doing DCA actually gave me a new activity, and it wasn't boring. I was required to continue managing my finances well to ensure my DCA program ran smoothly. Everyone's financial capabilities are different, and I positioned myself to remain productive so I could generate additional income besides my main job.
It seems to be true that for some guys, perhaps especially traders, that the ONLY way for excitement (or a lack of boredom) for them is to be constantly having to monitor bitcoin prices so that every once in a while (depending on how active they are trying to be) trades can be made in order to potentially increase the profitability of their coins (by lowering the buy costs) or by shaving off some dollars (that they were able to scalp without any costs.
Even if we might recognize that there can be some fun in regards to buying and selling and trying to either skim off some extra dollars or to lower the costs per BTC (including the idea of stacking more BTC for the same amount of dollars invested), the use of our time in these kinds of attempts might not be as greatly used as we might consider the fun to be.. and it seems that playing around with the price to try to get more dollars and/or bitcoin might not be as much of a great use of our time as we are perceiving it to be.
I understand that sometimes guys can find planning and keeping track of the bitcoin and even projecting future cashflows, future BTC accumulated and future cash accumulated to be somewhat uninteresting as compared with the titillation of trying to trade and to skim off some dollars/bitcoin for free, yet it also seems to me that there can still be ways to help to make keeping track of bitcoin/cash holdings and projecting the future and then later comparing future results to projections as ways of being interesting and fun... and perhaps even to be more stress free in terms of ways to recognize and appreciate ongoing growth that likely comes from investing in terms of the up and down possibilities (and stress) that comes from trading... and yeah, guys might even consider that even if they have considerable down possibilities, there are ways to structure their various trades that if they "hit the jackpot" every once in a while, then the one win will make up for the various times that they had lost - which truly seems like a gambler's fallacy and also likely outcomes of gambler fallacies too, especially with an asset like bitcoin that we should be able to look at historical charts and see that guys who had errored on the side of building and HODLing of their coins, they had ended up with considerable profits, yet guys who had been trading, they had been continuing putting at risk the various profits that their bitcoin holdings were building up when they would sell with an expectation to be able to buy back cheaper and ongoingly putting themselves into a waiting posture rather than a posture in which they would be ongoingly, persistently, regularly, consistently and perhaps even aggressively buying bitcoin (during times that their various back up funds were otherwise strong).
So, maybe there can be differences in regards to what guys perceive as fun (not boring)? I will surely admit that with something like bitcoin, there have been so many times that historically, bitcoiners had gone through periods in which their ongoing building of their bitcoin holdings were not showing progress in terms of dollars, and sure maybe they were building the quantity of their bitcoin and maybe they were even making sure that they always had cash on hand and their levels of stress in regards to ongoing available cash were becoming fewer and fewer because they were getting better and better at their cashflow management and not stressing themselves out into cash shortfalls, as had been the case when they might have had been trading and/or during times prior to their having had learned how to make sure that they were reasonably and ongoingly stacking bitcoin within personally acceptable boundaries.
There are likely a lot of ways to try to establish excitement in our lives, including figuring out ways to try to increase our discretionary funds and/or decrease our expenses, so that we will feel comfortable to keep on building our bitcoin stack size every single week, even if some weeks the dollar value of that stash seems to be dropping way more than the amount of new cash we are putting in and when our new cash put into bitcoin does not seem to be growing our bitcoin stash by large amounts, and maybe some weeks we are only adding 10k satoshis or some other modest bitcoin quantity, yet we can look back any records that we are trying to keep and we can see that our satoshis are ongoingly growing, every single week (or every single month if we are keeping track in that kind of a way). So sometimes there can be excitement in both taking various actions, but also ongoingly monitoring the progress in the actions that we had been taking, and surely if we have a period of 2-3 years that we had generated weekly and/or monthly data, we can experience some excitement in seeing how the various data points evolve and even having some other cross comparisons of our historical records to remember where we were at during various historical points and to see the progress over decently long periods of time that likely becomes even more exciting once we get through a whole cycle or through a cycle and a half and we can see that we had kept stacking the whole time.. and maybe even trying to learn from what we did or did not do at various points in our stacking and if we might have had been able to handle the situation better, since we know that at the time we were going through various BTC price points and various BTC stacking points, we did not really know the future at that point in time, except maybe having expectations that at some point in the future the bitcoin price would go up, and we might be able to recognize and appreciate our own resilience (as not being boring) to go through those various difficult periods in our bitcoin accumulation journey.
For example, right now, there could be guys who had been investing in bitcoin for right around 3 years, and they might be feeling questionable levels of progress in their own bitcoin holdings, and maybe they came to bitcoin in early to mid 2023, and they decided to buy $100 per week in bitcoin and to simultaneously shore up their back up funds, so that maybe in the 3 years, they ended up putting around $16k into bitcoin, and they had accumulated around 0.3 BTC. Let's say that their monthly expenses are right around $1,500 per month, and perhaps in the past 3 years, they had built up their back up funds from around 3 weeks of their expenses (maybe starting at $1k), and right now they have right around 3.5 months of their expenses (right around $5,500) in various kinds of cash-related funds in which some of the funds are more liquid (such as in local cash) and other funds might take a week or two to access, and so they are in a way better financial/psychological position based on where they are at, and maybe they had been controlling their spending through that whole time, too... so they were still able to spend on consumable goods, yet they were purposefully living in a way that they were not being wasteful with their money..and yeah, guys might consider some aspects to be boring and less exciting, since maybe they see their peers (guys with similar income levels) to be spending in ways that are much more luxurious, so the information about their prosperity or if they have been doing the right thing to be building their bitcoin and strengthening their cashflows.
It could be that such a guy is still really early in his bitcoin accumulation journey, and he may consider that it may well take him more than 10 more years to continue to accumulate bitcoin, and he might be trying to consider if there might be ways for him to increase his discretionary income and he is not sure if he will ever build up to one whole BTC, even though he believes that he is not likely going to even going to need a whole bitcoin, especially if he is considering t10-15 years from now, he may well be in a pretty good position even if he is ONLY able to accumulate somewhere between 0.5 BTC and 0.7 BTC by that time, yet he is not very sure about these future targets and he is largely just accumulating bitcoin within his own means and continuing to try to keep his bitcoin accumulation as interesting and fun.. and even with his current bitcoin stash size, he had been spending some time learning the various ways to keep his accumulated bitcoin secure... and maybe he ONLY moves bitcoin from the exchange (if he is buying on exchanges) to his private wallet every few months.... but he wants to get the bitcoin amount (or the dollar value of the amount) up to a certain threshold level before he moves those coins to a private wallet. He might even be trying to learn lightning network and/or various ways to have some of his wallets as hot wallets, some as medium wallets and some as cold wallets, so he might be considering ways to manage his wallets and to try to preserve both security and privacy. These are not boring things to learn and to practice... so for example, if he is ongoingly looking out for opportunities that he might be able to spend his bitcoin, yet he already knows that since he is in his early bitcoin accumulation phases that if he spends any of his bitcoin, then he will likely try to make sure to buy back at least 10% to 20% more bitcoin than the amount that he spent... and those are his personal goals to try to make his bitcoin accumulation interesting (and not boring).
I have a target of $30 per week, for example, but I have to strive to allocate more than my usual minimum, not less. I know we can invest any amount without overexerting ourselves, but we have to push ourselves.
Perhaps I'm very excited when doing DCA, so that's what makes this strategy not boring, but in fact, the opposite. Because in my experience, something boring is an activity where I'm not excited about what I'm doing.
I did a quickie look at your forum profile and some of your post history @pusaka, and you have only about a year less than me on the forum, yet at the same time it appears that you spent a lot of time with shitcoins, gambling and maybe other behaviors that did not help you to stay focused on ongoing and persistent accumulation of bitcoin through buying of bitcoin through the years - since surely if you would have had even invested as low as $20 per week into bitcoin since your forum registration date in April 2015 (congratulation for having had gone to more than 11 years on the forum), you would have had invested around $11.5k, and you would have had accumulated close to 6 BTC.
Of course, we cannot cry over bygones and/or what we should have had done, and we have to deal with where we are at, what we are doing and maybe if we might be able to learn from whatever we had been doing in the past to make improvements to our circumstances.
I understand that sometimes it ends up taking guys some time to figure out how to make sure they stay focused on accumulating bitcoin through buying bitcoin on a regular and consistent basis... and surely, many times, any of us can run into cashflow issues, yet we can also try to make sure to ongoingly build our bitcoin holdings, even if there are likely going to be a lot of ups and downs in the bitcoin price along the way, which likely is going to continue to happen in bitcoin's future, even though at the same time, there are always going to be uncertainties in regards to the future, whether referring to bitcoin and/or referring to various other macro-factors.
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I understand your point here, and I must agree completely that Dollar-Cost Averaging in bitcoin doesnt have to boring as some people see it, the truth Is, many investors adapt it to fit thier cashflow, just has you explained here and that flexibility it actually what make it a more sustainable long-term. However, the main priority in Dollar-Cost Averaging DCA is just disciplne and consistency, having the minimum commitment irrespective or the market conditions at any moment.
You have actually highlighted a good example of how newbies or the experienced investors can build on that foundation easily and still succeed, DCA actually removes the stress of one trying to predict the prices, but it doesnt actually stop anyone from being active. By knowing how much money comes in and how much goes out, after one can be able to know his discretionary income to invest in bitcoin, also people don't actually need to stress thierselves about the exact price, instead they should give thierselves a very convenient time frame to make thier weekly purchases regularly without overthinking the price movements.
Sure. One thing is the extent to which DCA benefits us as compared with other ways that we might attempt to accumulate bitcoin, and the comparison point of the guys proclaiming that DCA is boring seems to be that trading is less boring, yet even if trading is less boring, it is quite questionable the extent to which we would be actually benefitted from trading as compared with DCA and practices around DCA.
The other matter relates to the extent to which having more stress because of trading is a better thing or if the less stressful situation around DCA ends up being better, even though DCA could be argued to be boring. I understand that there are quite a few people who become anxious and they feel like they want to do stuff and/or create excitement in their activities, whether it is related to their bitcoin activities or their other activities. It does not really seem to be logical for us to want to create excitement with our bitcoin investment, even though maybe some guys cannot help themselves in terms of their believing that it is better to create excitement in their bitcoin investment.
Even in my more than 12 year history being involved in bitcoin, I had largely errored on the side of accumulation in my early bitcoin years, and then in my later bitcoin years, I had errored on the side of mostly HODLing - and surely I have witnessed a lot of guys seeming to get bored with bitcoin's price when it is not moving very much in longer periods that are several months or more, yet it seems to me that if many of the guys had stayed focused on mostly accumulating bitcoin in their first 4-6 years in bitcoin, then they would have had still experiences a lot of excitement in various bitcoin price movements, since sometimes their bitcoin holdings would be in profits, and other times in great profits and then other times in lesser profits than they had been earlier, yet the trend would have had still been that their bitcoin would have had grown in an upwards direction, even though the dollar value of the holdings would have had decent likelihoods of varying in quite drastic ways. The formula for how much the value of the bitcoin in dollars would have had been more reliable in circumstances that guys were mostly buying and holding rather than fucking around trying to trade or engaging in selling with expectations of buying back cheaper.
In bitcoin, there seems to have had been way more uncertainty, and even possibilities of losses (or failure to gain as much) with guys fucking around with trading their bitcoin rather than just staying focused on ongoing buying of bitcoin and holding of their bitcoin, even if sometimes their bitcoin purchases ended up being infrequent in terms of the timeline, and/or varying in the quantities that were able to be bought based on the quantity of their cashflows (how much fiat/discretionary funds they had available to buy bitcoin).
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Trying to invest with a higher amount can be a good opportunity in the beginning. I think you are experienced person though i will give you a advice that you have to be a more careful so that you do not go beyond the discretionary income. Because if you can invest a little aggressively in the beginning, there is a greater chance of getting more sats at a lower price.
Holy fucking shit, @ruykeri. Guys who are investing and who are with a long term investment timeline that is 4-10 years or more (and more likely more than 10 years), do not need to panic themselves to get in so that they have the potential to profit more.
I don't have a problem with guys trying to front load their bitcoin investment, yet guys still have to figure out how aggressive they are able to be based on their ongoingly monitoring their income and their expenses and making sure that they do not overly buy bitcoin, so they have to divide their discretionary funds into investment funds, back up funds and discretionary consumption. Even if guys want to invest more in the beginning, they may well not be able to accomplish such. Another thing is that pusaka has already been registered on the forum for 11 years, so he is not new to bitcoin, even if he might be trying to figure out ways to buy as much bitcoin as he is able to buy, he does not appear to be a beginner to the process.. and he might even have to figure out ways to fix some of his bad habits.. not that any of us can know exactly where pusaka is at in regards to how early he is in the bitcoin accumulation process and/or whether he had actually already accumulated some bitcoin.
If you want to increase DCA, you should try to increase income. Because only when discretionary income increases, you will get the opportunity to make DCA with a higher amount.
Sure, there is nothing wrong with trying to increase income (or increase discretionary funds by increasing income and/or decreasing expenses), yet it does not seem that pusaka has given us enough information to be proclaiming that he needs to increase his discretionary funds at this point in time.
You are trying that too, it is a very good decision. But many people think of DCA as boring in a negative sense, because here you have to buy Bitcoin and hold it for a long time. It is annoying for those who want profit in the short term.
Are you having your own dilemma in regards to investing versus trading @ruykeri? Sounds like it. There are advantages for any of us to try to figure out ways that we are not causing ourselves to become overly emotional about what we are doing, even if we might be trying to figure out some balance to be as aggressive as we are able to be in our bitcoin accumulation. If we are worried that the price might drop, we might need to keep some spare money for buying dips, or otherwise, if we are able to accept that we are trying to create our own systems/practices in which we are trying to buy at least $30 per week in bitcoin and even trying to push that amount to higher levels, we might be satisfied enough that we are ongoingly accumulating bitcoin without really getting too worked up about whether the bitcoin price is high, low or sideways.. and maybe we are ongoingly looking at our bitcoin stash, trying to grow it and even considering that it may well take us an additional 10 years or more to start to get close to what we believe might be our bitcoin accumulation target and/or timeline.
Sometimes, if guys get into a practice in which they are buying bitcoin every single week and they are wanting to increase their purchase amounts, yet they are still struggling to maintain their current weekly purchase amount (in this case $30 per week), they may well have to stay at that $30 per week level for a while until they might be able to identify ways in which they might be able to increase the weekly amount within the resources that they have available and/or the resources that they might be able to muster up.
Each guy likely has his own specifics and considerations in regards to what might be reasonable and/or realistic possible changes, and some guys might be already working many hours per week, and they are not sure how to increase the pay for their number of hours, or if they might have some other possible ways to increase their income, and sometimes further training or trying to get a promotion (or a different kind of a job) might be difficult to accomplish, and it could take some guys a decent amount of time if they might be young enough to take some courses, they might be able to go from a laborer to an electrician or some other way that their income would end up increasing based on their training, experiences or even which guys might be good to know in order to be able to get into higher paying positions.
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if you are investing in bitcoin, you need to have an emergency funds its your safe net as an investor it is a place you can always fall back to when you are having some financial difficulties, if you dont have it, then I think you need to pause your bitcoin investment and build your emergency funds or reduce your bitcoin accumulation and focus on building a strong emergency funds.
Any of us who are considering starting to invest in bitcoin have to figure out the extent to which we have discretionary funds so that we are able to invest in bitcoin, and then we have to consider the extent to which we already have back up funds. If we are not sure about our back up funds level based on the chaos of our income/expenses and/or maybe some debts that we have, then we likely need to figure out that stuff so that we can be sure that we are investing from our discretionary funds and not money that we need for our expenses.
If we come to an assessment that we either do not have back up funds or our back up funds are not sufficient for us to be able to determine that we have enough money to last us until our next paycheck, then we likely are not in a position to buy any bitcoin... but if we were considering buying $100 in bitcoin from what we had concluded is the remaining of our discretionary funds before our next paycheck, then we likely would be o.k. to put $33.33 into bitcoin, $33.33 into discretionary consumption and $33.33 into our back up funds, and to continue to do this each week (if we were to have $100 in discretionary funds each week) until we have built up our back up funds and our bitcoin simultaneously.
There is nothing wrong with building up bitcoin and back up funds at the same time, if we are sure that we had already determined that we are using discretionary funds. We do not have to give more emphasis to back up funds, unless we are really not sure if we in fact have enough discretionary funds to be able to invest in bitcoin.
Now, if we have already been buying bitcoin for some time, and we have both build up our bitcoin and we built up some back up funds, if we come to a situation in which either our income had gone down and/or our expenses went up, then we may well end up having to tap into whatever back up funds and even potentially completely depleting our back up funds, so then we are put into a situation in which we might feel that we are at square 1, even though in this scenario we already have some bitcoin, yet we had ended up exhausting most if not all of our back up funds, and so in those kinds of situations, we may well conclude that we cannot buy anymore bitcoin until our back up funds get to a certain level of comfort, and so it might not be exactly easy how much to emphasize back up funds or how much back up funds we need to build up before we can continue to buy bitcoin, yet if we fuck up and we are not building our back up funds at all (or not sufficiently), then we could end up putting ourselves in a position where we end up having to sell our bitcoin and becoming either a no coiner or maybe just having way less bitcoin than what we should have had or could have had if we had been making sure to maintain sufficient amount of funds in cash - even after a situation in which we had already had been forced to mostly (if not completely) deplete our back up funds..
If we screw up, we will have to face the consequences.. and sometimes we might look back at 10 years of bitcoin accumulation and see that we did not even come close to accumulating as much bitcoin as we could have had accumulated if we had employed better cashflow management practices, and yeah, when 10 years pass and we had been screwing up, we cannot turn back the clock and do that period over again. Each of us needs to try to figure out ways to lessen the chances of screw ups and/or to make sure that the impacts of any of our screw ups do not cause us regrets about the way we had been striking our various cashflow management and/or bitcoin investment balances.. and many of us will have screw ups, but we hope that the screw ups were not causing irreversible financial/psychological damages.
