it turns out that there is still a lot that I have not learned even in the strategy of accumulating bitcoin itself.
But I'm more worried about my mentality in trading. I am often wrong in making decisions in making purchases. maybe I haven't studied properly what resistance and support lines are. so sometimes I still feel panicked when going to buy and also when going to sell. because sometimes I'm confused where to put my order. sometimes when I put a buy message it always doesn't get hit. and the price bounced before it hit my buy order. so I panicked and bought in a hurry in an instant.
That is part of the reason that DCA is a better strategy than trying to time the dip when you really cannot have very high levels of confidence about if the BTC price is going to dip more or if it has already dipped as much as it is going to go. Almost no one is going to be able to time bottoms and tops, and if you try to establish a strategy in which you are not stressing about when are the bottoms, then you will probably start to feel better after you have been into bitcoin for a while. Sometimes it can take several years before you start to feel comfortable with your BTC accumulation because a large number of people do not tend to have lump sums of spare money that they can invest, so they tend to have to invest slowly over time.
So for example, if you decide that you are going to invest $100 per week over the next 6 months ($2,600), then you might try to time your purchase each week, but maybe if you are frustrated about trying to time the purchase, you just buy at any price during each of the 26 weeks.. so you are sticking with a budget and maybe trying to time the bottom but not getting too stressed out if you cannot figure it out because over time you are continuing to build up your number of satoshis to the best of your ability and you realize that it is very difficult to time the price. and even supposed smart people get these timing of the BTC price matters wrong on a pretty regular basis.
Looks like I really have to learn and apply this DCA strategy. because after reading your explanation. I think the strategy you wrote seems to be able to keep my psychology in accumulating bitcoin. because to be honest, I've been accumulating at irregular times and without knowing the DCA strategy. So mentally and psychologically I was a little disturbed, such as quickly panicking and in a hurry because I was constantly chasing prices in purchases. even though if I can accumulate gradually little by little with a routine every week maybe I can be calmer. because the goal is to accumulate.
You are adequately describing the difficulty that exists in attempting to balance the amount that you are investing in such a way that should help with lessening the amount of panic that any of us can feel in terms of feeling that we have either investing too much into bitcoin or that we have not invested enough, and by the way, your previous practice of investing irregularly could still have been considered to be some variation of DCA - even though a more pure variation of DCA would be attempting to invest more regularly and systematically rather than being less purposeful about it (as you may have been doing previously).
I believe that you are more likely to learn more about yourself and your own sticking points when you are purposefully trying to focus on the matter in terms of applying a regular practice and by trying to NOT become too impatient about what you are doing, and I am not even suggesting that you set it and forget it but instead you can put something into practice and then you can review it from time to time and tweak it and then you can also consider how your practice plays out while the BTC price is changing and to see if there are points in which you are getting anxious regarding if there might be something that you can do to make yourself more comfortable.
Let's stick with my earlier example in which you already set yourself up with a 6 month budget of $100 per week that you are going to invest into bitcoin for the next 6 months, and you had already established that the amount is a fair balance because you have projected your cashflow out for 18 months (or some other timeframe that you believe is reasonable for your circumstances), and you have already accounted for your various incoming cashflows and your outgoing expenses, and when you plot out your whole time, you can see that there are some irregularities that are projected in your cashflow, but you have spare cash in there to cushion out the extremes, so you feel really comfortable that you are not going to miss the $100 amount that you have already allocated towards buying bitcoin every week.
As one, two or three months go by, you can look at whether some aspects of your income or expenses have changed, and then you can also have plans to increase the amounts that you allocate towards BTC or to reduce it, and maybe you want to keep your DCA amount the same but instead you have another category of funds that you place in categories of buying on dips and/or lump sum investing, but overall you might have a preference to keep the DCA amount to be the same and to just play around more with some of the other ways that you might either increase your income coming in or to reduce your expenses.
Part of my point is that you are likely going to learn more and more about yourself while you are learning new information about bitcoin and maybe even other investments, your levels of consumption, ways that you might increase your income, ways to organize the information and even to project your various balances going forward and/or your thoughts and feelings towards those things.
30 years ago, I would have various paper versions of my budgets and my projections, and of course, the more that I was able to have access to computers, some of the computer programs (such as spreadsheets) became less expensive and even easier to use and even more powerful. Excel has been a pretty powerful tool in which you are able to create all kinds of formulas, but even using some of the more basic functions, you are going to be able to copy and past (and tweak to the extent necessary), and to save your work, and to be able to go back and look at some of your formulas for how you had been projecting going forward had ended up playing out in the real world.
Some of my projections of my cashflows from 20 years ago have similar formulas as the ones that I am using today, but there will be various points in which certain categories were added so they were not present in my earlier versions, and even for me, I can see that bitcoin was not part of any of my investment and cashflow projections before 2013, but then as I added bitcoin to my projections, I have some supplemental worksheets in which I see that I added new categories of assessment after I had been into bitcoin for a while then I realized that I had to change some of my categories of information (assessment) based on how much value had gone into bitcoin and then how BTC price performance (for me first down in 2014 and then flat in 2015 and then later up in late 2016 and thereafter) had also caused me to feel that I needed to reassess how I had previously been looking at some of my earlier information that I had compiled about my investment and cashflow projections.
We cannot necessarily rush any of these matters, because even though I have always had some ongoing targets to always invest/save at least 10% of my income (even 30 years ago), some of my numbers from 30 years ago look way smaller than how the later numbers started to build and to grow over time; however, it is my contention that I would not have been able to increase some of the numbers at dates later down the road if I had not gone through those ongoing building stages. Sure, it is possible to get lucky, but it seems way more likely to have higher chances of success by consistently and persistently engaging in practices to build rather than to gamble with investment portfolio assets. In other words, sizes of financial portfolios are more likely to come through building rather than gambling, even though I am not opposed to taking risks with portions of portfolio value, and to realize that the riskier portions may or may not end up building in value as much as the more conservative aspects of the investment portfolio.
It is difficult to analyze the current price movement of bitcoin for the short or medium term except for the long term, and trading for the current situation in my opinion is difficult to make good profits. even if you can profit maybe only a small profit and even then if you are lucky and do it seriously and full time.
and we can't blame the whales for the role of the whales to pump and dump suddenly without thinking of small investors, and I prefer to take advantage of the current situation to do DCA because I think this is the best way for the long term because I don't want to bother looking at the market whose direction is unclear, and in the long run the direction is clearly profitable and most importantly patiently waiting for it and doing DCA.
As long as we're not in a rush to make a profit and only really buy when the price drops drastically, it might be a good time to buy it and keep waiting until the price really gets a pump.
I hate to be repeating myself over and over; however, members keep repeating the idea of buying on dips as if it were the same as DCA, and it is not. DCA is a different idea, which is buying regularly no matter what the BTC price. Of course, buying on dips can be supplemented into DCA, but pure forms of DCA do not attempt to predict the BTC price and just buy regularly no matter what is the price.
Since I believe that DCA is the most superior of strategies for beginners who are aiming to get a stake into BTC, my recommendation for beginners is to start with DCA. Of course, if you want to be more interactive with your BTC investment, then you can supplement your DCA strategy with lump sum investing and buying on dips.
Beginners who do not have a lot of confidence in their abilities to attempt to predict the dips or even to spend adequate time involved in watching the BTC price should just start out with pure DCA and maybe later down the road reassess if they want to get more involved in looking at the BTC price and/or trying to time dips and setting up their budgets to supplement with such buying on dip strategies.
Usually, after the price drops drastically, the price will get a pump and even if the pump is not very high, it is enough for us to make a profit. And if we can repeat that, I think the gains we get could be huge.
It tends to NOT be a good idea to include trading in any BTC accumulation strategy which you seem to want to calculate your profits in terms of making dollar profits, which may well ONLY result in short-term satisfaction, and trying to sell to buy back lower tends to end up in a lot of people losing money and getting too emotionally involved in trying to figure out which way the BTC price is going in the short term, which again does not tend to be a good strategy to accumulate BTC.. if accumulating BTC is the goal and if the goals are to attempt to build in the long term.. such as 4-10 years or more into the future.
And if you don't want to be too busy trading, maybe the DCA strategy is a good one because you keep buying bitcoins at low prices and have to adjust your funds. With the DCA strategy, you can collect bitcoins slowly and not in a hurry, which is good for your profit growth later.
Again.. you are repeating the idea in which you are mixing up DCA and buying on dips... Those are two different ideas, even though you can attempt to do both. There is nothing wrong with attempting to do both if you want to attempt to do both, but you do not need to attempt to do both.
I think we never know if the whales will blindly do pumps and dumps in the market but with the notice of large assets being transferred to the exchange it is possible that the whales will do it, but true if there is no panic then this might cause any problems even can face the market more relaxed when anything happens, let it be a waste but seeing the prospect of a decline it can buy more if you want to say buy dips.
I think we can adjust more and more the direction of the market, if it declines then we should think more that it's a golden opportunity to buy.
That's true because the whales will pump and dump on the market suddenly and make many people panic. After all, it's too late to act. They can only follow the movement and try to enter the market. Some of them were able to profit from the situation, while others were caught in a panic and ended up at a loss. Right now is a good time to buy bitcoin as the price is still below but we also have to be careful not to try to buy when the price gets a pump because the price will go back down after that. So only with analysis can we do to find the moment to buy and sell.
You are advocating a kind of trading, and I don't necessarily disagree with you; however, trading is not easy to accomplish (especially shorter term), even if you think you know what you are doing.... and in this thread, seems to be emphasizing BTC accumulation for the long term rather than trading, and sure there can be considerations of longer term trends that also might attempt to accumulate more when the price seems to be down and to shave off some profits when the price is up.. but probably not making moves that involve getting caught up into trying to figure out short term BTC price movements, which you seem to be advocating attempting to figure out those kinds of short term price moves.
By the way, we have had plenty of instances in bitcoin in which people have sold very large portions of their BTC stash because they thought that the pump was not sustainable and they end up selling way too many BTC too soon.. and similar dynamics have happened with price drops in which people buy way too many BTC too soon and then they run out of money to buy more when the price continues to drop.. and sure, I am not suggesting that you are not aware of these possibilities, but the risks to one's BTC portfolio can become quite great when they get carried away with making short term plays that end up making their situation worse than if they had just stuck with a more consistent long term strategy that involves ongoing accumulation without so much regards to price and/or trying to figure out short term BTC price movements.
