Substantively, it may not really matter so much what we call it, and so each of us have to consider how persistent we are in regards to investing into bitcoin, and surely people have a lot of things going on in life, so some of those people might set up an automatic DCA, even though personally I like the idea of manually executing DCAs, on a practical basis, it can be better for some folks to have their DCA buys (weekly or whatever to be executed automatically.
When you said manually, can you please give some clarification. Because base on how I understand this reply, having a fixed time to purchase like weekly or monthly is a form of automatic DCAing? Just wanna know the different between manual DCAing and automatic DCAing, it really picks my interest.
Some exchanges allow the setting up of automatic DCAing. You can choose an amount and a frequency, perhaps daily, weekly or some other inverval - exchanges will vary in t how an automated DCA could be set up and part of the reason that I don't like them is that they usually cannot be set up for a very specific time, but instead at the the most daily, so the exchange will likely batch all of the DCA's at the same time and might even play shenanigans with the DCAs, though maybe some of the exchanges have improved their systems. If you are going to use an exchange to automatically DCA, I would look into how they describe their way of executing the automatic DCAs.
Manual DCA is that you do your own buy, and surely you can even set your buy up as a market taker limited order rather than having your order be a market maker. Market takers have lower fees than market makers, and of course, people are going to have differing rates and differing options depending on their geographical location and which exchanges are available to them.
Regarding your statement: "it really
picks my interest." I am pretty sure you meant to say: "it really
piques my interest"
Even though I agree with you that DCA might not work for everyone, you have not given an example of lump sum, and you have largely given an example of DCA because you are suggesting that the only reason that the guy had not executed his DCA is because he was busy with other things... yet you are suggesting that he still is interested in buying BTC, he just is busy with other things.
I would suggest that a non-DCA approach might be a guy who is not really very seriously thinking about BTC.. so sometimes he thinks about buying BTC and other times he doesn't, so he is erratic based on his own lack of conviction about BTC
Base on my understanding, I will say lump sum is the opposite of DCAing strategy or method. Because it literally deals with one going in at once , without breaking the payment down . Like for instance I have $10k , and I want to invest on bitcoin, I can decide to break it down into 10 places which will be $200 each , and I will have a fixed time to make my purchases ( with the $200) either weekly or monthly, buying at different price interval. Or can use lump sum method by using all the $10k at once to purchase bitcoin without any form of breaking in a fixed time
Fair enough.. Let's say that you were brand new to bitcoin, and you had $10k in the bank that you had authorized yourself to buy bitcoin. You could invest all of that $10k right away or within a few quick payments over a week or so, and I would consider that to mostly be lump sum.
You could also decide to divide the $10k into three parts. $6k to buy right away (that would be lump sum) $2,500 for buying on dips - let's say 10 Buy orders of $250 every $1k that the price goes down starting at $62,500-ish... so that would be having buy orders down to about $53,500 if there were really 10 buy orders with $1k increments and also that you would realize that whenever you set up buy on dip buy orders, you run the risk of some or all of them not filling, so that could result in your having that extra fiat that could have had been used to buy BTC but it did not end up getting deployed. In regards to DCA, you could allocate the remaining $1,500 for DCAing.. maybe $100 per week for the next 15 weeks. (on Saturdays in the mornings (around 9am) to be manually executed..and perhaps with some variance in the time or the way it might be executed).
Of course, besides that $10k of starting capital, you might also have a regular DCA that you are planning to carry out for the next 1 to 4 years (perhaps on a weekly basis), and you also might have some regular buying on dips that you have planned too, but those regular DCAs and buying on dips would be planned to come out of your regular income, whether you are able to buy $100 per week with the DCAs and/or perhaps a similar amount with the buying on dips or some other amount that is within the decided amount of your anticipated discretionary income that you want to allocate towards buying bitcoin on a weekly basis and also perhaps for buying dips, too.
You also might know that with your job, 2-3 times per year you receive a bonus of somewhere between $2k and $4k depending on the performance of your company for that period of time, but you don't know exactly when those bonuses are going to come or if they are going to come, so you don't plan your specific finances based on the bonuses, yet now that you are getting into bitcoin, and you believe that you are serious about BTC accumulation, you decide that you are going to use between 60% to 80% of any bonuses that you receive to buy bitcoin.. so each time when you get the bonuses, you are going to decide the extent to which you will buy right away with the bitcoin allocated portion or if you might employ DCA and/or buying on dip with some portion of the amount that you will have available to you. With regard to the bonuses, the part you buy right away, I would call that lump sum, even though you might choose ONLY a small amount (or a minority) of the total amount to buy right away.. You use your discretion regarding how to divide each of the categories and how to execute the BTC buys that would result from those anticipated bonus amounts.