Surely one of the best, if not the best, of teachers is experience, so each of us should be taking the advice of others with a grain of salt, and not presuming them to be able to determine what is best for us, yet at the same time, sometimes many of us can become stubborn and end up doing something that ends up screwing up, and sometimes we will repeat similar screw-ups before we finally learn our lesson, and so surely a forum like this allows us to explore our ideas, and figure out the extent to which other forum members address our issues, yet so many times, I find that most of the more difficult problems (and dilemmas), I have to figure out my own balancing of the trade-offs.... and surely sometimes other members are helping me indirectly when they might explain some of their thinking process or how they went about resolving one of their dilemmas..
Let's say that a member suggests that you should figure out your cashflow and expenses for the next 6 months and attempt to figure out your discretionary income for each pay period, and then when you are starting out to start to invest with less than 50% of your discretionary income in case you make some mistakes, yet you believe that the recommendation is too conservative so not ONLY do you not project out your cash flow, you also ballparkedly estimate an investment rate of around 80% of your discretionary income, and maybe that sloppiness ends up working out, yet it could blow up in your face in a major way in which you end up having to sell some of your bitcoin or take some other emergency measures, or it might just blow up in a smaller way in which you have to move funds around and sweat a bit for around a month or so to make sure that your income is higher than your expenses for the period until your next paycheck. Sometimes the learnings sink in much more when a guy goes through some scenarios in which he is able to recognize mistakes that he actually made and reasons that he might want to avoid making those kinds of mistakes in the future.
So sometimes we can say to another member: "you dummy!!! Why didn't you listen to other members", and surely sometimes the member is ONLY able to absorb so much of the information about what to do or how to do it without plugging the information into their own practices, and they might not even be able to see the exact fit of the information until they had gone through some kind of a similar situation in order to figure out why certain practices can end up saving them but increasing the odds of profiting in financial and psychological ways... including that sometimes the result of profits (or being in a better position) are not apparent for quite a long time later, maybe even years and years later... so in that sense, sometimes the first several years in bitcoin, there might be a lot of work that needs to be done to both build strong cashflow management practices and to also build up a bitcoin portfolio holdings (that might not always be in profits), but then years and years down the road there can be recognition that the earliest times of preparation ended up paying off quite significantly in order to establish good systems, put them into practice and maybe even sometimes being able to see how some of the earlier purchases ended up with really high appreciation rates and added to the overall stack of BTC...
....such as I remember sometimes being a bit worried that some of my earliest bitcoin purchases in 2015 were not really going to add up to much, yet at around that time, I had put a system into practice so that if I had any kind of extra cashflow that came to me, whether $20, $50 or $100, then I would divide that amount in half in order to buy bitcoin with half of it right away (or within a day), and then put the other half into my cashflow reserves, which likely was going to be needed for various extra expenses within that month or the next month. So at that time, bitcoin prices were mostly in the mid-$200s, so if I ended up buying $25 worth of bitcoin, that would mean that I got right around 0.1BTC, which seemed so small, but still a continued stacking process through that whole year in which my cashflow was fairly tight based on some then business related issues that I was having, and it did not help matters financially or psychologically that BTC prices were down, too... not until much later, there was a realization that the low BTC prices were just a temporary (even though seeming long term) phenomena.
It is a mistake if the BTC price does not end up dipping, and they had been holding too much cash waiting for such a dip that did not end up happening.
Sure there are guys who wished that they had more to buy during dips, yet a balance still needs to be struck in regards to continuing to stack bitcoin and not getting too caught up upon the price, especially for newbies who likely are still in their earlier of stages of stacking bitcoin and still need to build up their BTC stack to prepare for up.
Repeatedly, I describe that an overwhelming majority of the world (including folks who already own some bitcoin) are overly prepared for down and insufficiently prepared for UP, so each person needs to assess his level of preparedness for up in order to assure that he is sufficiently prepared for UP, and he ONLY has himself to blame if he is sitting on too much cash and overly preparing for downs that may not end up happening.
It's not as though it's totally out of place to look at Bitcoin price, and if we're able to, we can buy at a DIP price which will be to our advantage. The only issue is when you allow it deter you from buying as at when you ought to buy all because you want to be at a small profit.
Frequently newbies get overly obsessed about the extent to which they are in profits or not, especially in their first years of investing, which frequently causes them to do dumb things like overly waiting for dips that might not happen and sometimes selling too much too soon because they become too worried about either locking in profits or trying to buy back more at cheaper prices that might not end up happening within the timeline that they expect such cheaper prices to happen.
Ongoing BTC accumulation is likely a much better practice that also puts the BTC accumulator into a much better and more consistent mindset too.. yeah, it might not always be short term profitable to remain focused on ongoing BTC accumulation, yet I doubt there are very many traders who are going to be able to show better BTC portfolio as compared with the buyer accumulator, especially once we might get into longer timeframes such as 1-2 whole cycles... and yeah traders frequently think that they are so smart in the shorter time frames, yet selling too much BTC too soon has a pretty fucking large costs as compared with the HODLer who did not sell, even though such traders are likely still showing dollar profits.. but they tend to be way smaller than the longer term BTC HODLer.. and we have so many of those examples in BTC's history.. even a recent example of so many traders selling large chunks (if not all) of their BTC in the lower to mid $30ks in the October/November 2023 timeline and maybe they bought back in, yet I have my doubts about their outperforming the buyers/accumulators/hodlers.
Surely investors need to consider position size when they get started, and whether they invest with lump sum or DCA, they may still need to monitor position size, yet at the same time, they can still figure out their position size, and not become overly concerned about the extent to which their investment is profitable, especially in the first whole cycle, and also they might get distracted or deterred from investing in something like bitcoin if they are overly concerned about whether they are profits or not, especially if they come to bitcoin and they already know that it is likely to be extremely volatile in either direction in the short term, which could cause their investment to not be in profits during much of the earliest years, and surely if they are not comfortable with the level of volatility, the level of uncertainty or their desires to make sure that they are in profits in shorter timelines, then either they should adjust their position size until they are comfortable or perhaps get out of the investment (or don't even get into bitcoin) if they cannot figure out a position size level that allows them to NOT be overly obsessed with their BTC investment being in profits in relatively short timelines such as in less than a whole cycle.