[hansvm]

It's easy to pick a winning strategy when everything is going up. If that's the assumption you're using for your investments though (everything has been going up, so it'll keep going up) then DCA still probably isn't what you want -- it'll underperform even dead simple strategies like a diversified buy and hold nearly always. My point is that when choosing investments if you have any theory at all as to what the market might do (and if you don't, why are you investing?), you ought to choose a strategy which based on that information brings you close to your goals, and secondarily it's worth pointing out that in a broad variety of pretty ordinary market conditions DCA is not a good choice.

[jiofih]

Exactly. That theory is that the market will always go up long term (because capitalism is inherently inflationary) and historically, DCA plus holding has always given returns over a > 20y period with any reasonably mixed basket.

A “diversified buy & hold” assumes you have your entire 20y investment capital available at the outset, which is rarely the case.

[hansvm]

> A “diversified buy & hold” assumes you have your entire 20y investment capital available at the outset, which is rarely the case.

If you don't then you're effectively implementing DCA because you don't have better alternatives available -- regardless of the strategy you use, if you immediately invest spare funds as soon as they're available from a source of evenly distributed recurring income then it'll look a lot like DCA.

That's still consistent with my position of using the data you have to pick the best option you can. If you have options other than DCA (e.g., a sizable percentage people get some kind of windfall in their life), then carefully evaluate whether DCA is the right way to treat that capital. It usually won't be, even compared with dead simple strategies like a diversified buy-and-hold.

As an aside: Ignoring any kind of extreme luck, in a field like tech with rapid raises, no matter which investment strategy you choose your nest egg will almost entirely be comprised of funds from your last 5-10yrs of work.