Planning is the first stage of anything that is associated with consistency. It is following the plan that is called consistency. DCA is itself a plan and following your DCA is the consistency.
I get your point, but I don't see consistency as just following your plan, as plans can be followed in different ways. Let me say, for instance, that I have a plan to accumulate 1 Bitcoin before the end of one year, and initially I strategize to buy another 0.08335 before the end of every month. In the first two to three months, I was able to achieve that, but because of some kind of personal issue, you decided to shift out the amount you want to accumulate this month, but with the belief that you will be able to gather more than you plan for the next month so that you can cover up the balance of last month.
In such a case, I don't see that as consistency, as I view consistency as the process of doing a particular thing constantly, nonstop, until the purpose of that thing is achieved without even bridging any of the set-out plans along the way.
You've raised a valid point worth considering, but I still find myself agreeing with oduhu. He mentioned that consistency lies in following the plan. For instance, if the plan is to accumulate $1000 worth of BTC by year-end, and I achieve this goal each year using the DCA strategy, then I am consistent. The specific methods I use to reach that goal within the year might vary due to trends or economic factors, but the important part is maintaining the consistency of achieving that $1000 worth of BTC annually.
These may be arguments about semantics, and even though the whole idea might seem a bit trivial, there could be ways that guys go wrong because they take the ideas of consistency and persistency in the wrong direction.
It seems that the idea of consistency first came up in the context of either setting DCA orders on a regular basis and for a regular amount, whether that might be daily, weekly or monthly. Another way that it came up was in terms of buying on dips or even setting ladder increments, and the example was if you had $1,200 and if you were to set that for buying on dips.. would there be advantages in terms of setting 4 orders equally at $300 each, or might there be advantages in varying them.
If you are talking about how to reach a goal over a whole year, and then having variance in terms of ways that the goals are met, then you seem to be talking about being persistent to make your end of the year goal, but you might not follow consistent practices to reach the goal.. so if you have a $1,200 that you want to invest into bitcoin for the whole year, you could divide that into $100 per month, or maybe around $25 per week even though you would end up at $1,300 if you were to buy all of the 52 weeks of the year, so you could adjust that down to $23.08 in order to stay in a $1,200.16 budget for that year.
Consistency might be to keep investing $23.08 every week no matter what, which thereby would make that weekly buy a priority and maybe that money had already been somewhat set aside in order that it does not cause cashflow issues, so any flexibility that would thereby be needed might come from some other place in the budget..
And, don't get me wrong, I am not even devaluing the ideas of consistency and persistency because sometimes if someone is wanting to reach certain goals they need to set priorities, so they still likely have to set their goals in a a kind of realistic way in which they are able to carry out the goals - and so if the person does not have an adequate emergency fund, then s/he might have had set too aggressive of BTC accumulation goals and they might need to be adjusted downwardly in order to cause them to be more realistic.
You do seem to be mixing up your definitions a bit, so I am not sure if I am going to be able to pound the proper way of thinking about the matter into your head.
A more strict DCA approach is going to largely be price agnostic................
Another thing is that maybe this person has his budget pretty well figured out and his emergency fund is good, .............which is 1) lump sum 2) DCA, 3) buying on dips.................only one of the categories.
You have abled to pound the whole definitions and differences nicely in my mind because now I totally understand what makes DCA strict one and fancy one. Totally got the idea and thanks for the easy explanation too. Really appreciate.
PS: just thinking the advice like the three options you mentioned in the second scenario which are Lump sum, DCA and buying on Dips. I mean no offense, but do you also follow these same norms of investing. Means, aren't you are sharing VIP tips to everyone.
I have done all of the things that I talk about, and sure many times they are going to be tailored to the specific situation and depending on what stage someone is in his/her bitcoin journey, so if you are in an accumulation phase, you could be in early, middle or late accumulation which might affect how you might prioritize, and then perhaps if you have been accumulating bitcoin for a while, you may transition to a kind of maintenance and/or liquidation stage.. I consider that I did my most aggressive accumulation between late 2013 and late 2014, and by the end of 2014, I was starting to think that I had enough BTC, but at that time, I could not help myself to continue to accumulate in 2015 and 2016.. and sure I have been accumulating after 2016 too, but not as aggressively as I had done in that first year... and another thing is that even as early as 2015, I was already thinking that I was transitioning into a maintenance stage, but BTC accumulation is not excluded from that, even though some of the priorities and urgencies change.
Another thing is that many normal people (normies) might not be able to go from BTC accumulation to maintenance as quickly unless they might already be starting with an investment portfolio, and I had already largely had been building my investment portfolio for more than 20 years prior to getting into bitcoin, so it was likely easier to reach accumulation targets based on those kinds of considerations.. and it is my sense that many normies still might need to take nearly 20 years to build their BTC holdings, but surely BTC price appreciation could help to cut those BTC accumulation timelines down a lot more than might have had been the case in traditional investments. Of course, there are no guarantees that screw ups will not end up happening and there still may well be needs for the BTC accumulation times to take as long as they would have had taken through traditional methods... and there are also no guarantees that goals will be reached.. but surely a good thing if goals are actually able to be reached and even surpassed.
Well one of the ONLY ways that DCA really works is if you have some level of confidence that the asset in which you are investing is going to have periods in which it goes up in..........
Got it.
Strict DCA is not concerned about price. When you are concerned about the BTC price you are engaging in buying on dip strategies... not DCA.. ........
I already got this point as you explained it with examples in this same reply, Now I understand what strict, soft or hybrid DCA means.
Yes. I repeat myself sometimes.
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And also apply the DCA at the top which is to exchange from Bitcoin to the USDT and hold more dollars when the price is at the top, wait for the price to touch down again and buy back.
But such a model also has its own risk and that is why sometimes as an investor you make some adjustments in both your capital holdings and time adjustments.
Maybe I am quibbling with some of the semantics.. .. but I want to say that even though I am selling on the way up and buying on the way down, I am neither claiming to be trading nor selling enough BTC that I have any preferences that the BTC price goes back down..
so personally, I have been saying that the main strategy to attempt to build your BTC stack is to engage in various BTC accumulation strategies until you reach such a level that you are way overly-allocated into BTC and then at that point, you have more options and you may well be in a position to consider selling small amounts of BTC on the way up.;.but you still have to be more careful with any of those kinds of strategies, especially the earlier that you are in your BTC accumulation journey.
Accordingly, I don't consider selling of BTC to be a BTC accumulation strategy or even a good strategy to even be attempting to increase BTC holdings, even though it could be considered a kind of insurance strategy in the case that BTC prices were to end up going back down.... even though the amounts are greatly biased in favor of UP..
Let's say for example I were to have 10 BTC (and I am not even saying this is not a fictitious number), so maybe if the BTC price were to go down $5k from $30k to $25k, in this example, the overall value of my BTC holdings would have had dropped from $300k to $250k, and maybe I might have ended up buying back anywhere between $500 and $2k worth of BTC depending on how aggressively my buy back orders had been set. Accordingly, what I am saying is that the selling amount and the buy back amounts are not so great to overall affect the overall BTC portfolio size that continues to be heavily biased towards holding BTC.. and a perhaps a kind of maintance of the BTC portfolio size rather than either accumulation and/or liquidation.
It could be the case that I am engaging in a kind of complicated semantics in the way that I am describing some of these selling on the way up dynamics and how those proceeds are used to buy back.. even though to me it seems problematic for people to consider selling BTC to be BTC accumulation strategy - and this thread is meant to be mostly directed towards the ideas of BTC accumulation and holding.. not selling.
Planning is the first stage of anything that is associated with consistency. It is following the plan that is called consistency. DCA is itself a plan and following your DCA is the consistency.
I get your point, but I don't see consistency as just following your plan, as plans can be followed in different ways. Let me say, for instance, that I have a plan to accumulate 1 Bitcoin before the end of one year, and initially I strategize to buy another 0.08335 before the end of every month. In the first two to three months, I was able to achieve that, but because of some kind of personal issue, you decided to shift out the amount you want to accumulate this month, but with the belief that you will be able to gather more than you plan for the next month so that you can cover up the balance of last month.
In such a case, I don't see that as consistency, as I view consistency as the process of doing a particular thing constantly, nonstop, until the purpose of that thing is achieved without even bridging any of the set-out plans along the way.
Planning have an ultimate goal which is the target. In the example you gave which is accumulating 1 BTC in 12 months, the target is 1BTC and the process of achieving that is the plan. The process is not cast in stones as there can be unforseen circumstances, such as you mention, that could make you adjust a little. But as long as the target is achieved, to me the plan worked. You cannot say because something happened along the line and you made some adjustments to counterbalance it, then you are not consistent in following the plan. Even in economis, for every law propounded, there is always the clause: "other things being equal".
Persistence and consistency are also two differing concepts.
You are absolutely correct and that is what Nwada001 seems to be mixing up. By definition, persistence means pushing through when obstacle arises while consistency means building and following a process, that is repetitive in nature, in order to achieve a target.
Putting it together with respect to his example, it is persistence that is needed to sustain the plan even in the midst of challenges. If I want to accumulate 1BTC in a year with my monthly Salary, and I decide to set aside say 50% of it monthly to achieve that, if perhaps along the line I got another cash from other source that is up to the 50% and decided to double the amount of buying for that particular month, we cannot say I did not follow my plan again. In this case, the plan just got a boost. The target is always the goal while the time can vary a bit.
The more that we talk about this example, the more unrealistic I start to consider it to be. Sure, guys do end up coming up with goals regarding how many BTC that they want to accumulate within a certain time period, but part of the reason that the goal seems to be unrealistic is partly due to its being denominated in a salary that you are likely earning in another kind of a currency (not BTC) so there is a cause for way greater variability, so even if you might say that I plan to invest $30k into bitcoin within the next year, then you know how much dollars that you can put in and you know how much income that you have coming in... but yeah, sure maybe it is still be doable to suggest how much BTC to accumulate per month, so long as the amount is not at the upper limits of your capabilities and you have a sufficient amount of cushion contained within the amount that you are expecting to accumulate each month.