[singpolyma3]

I mean, never DCA anything that's terrible advice. But still better than what most people do.

[sweetjuly]

DCA is not unreasonable advice given that most people's greatest enemy is themselves. DCA helps avoid the very emotionally upsetting feeling of you throwing money into a fund and it dropping 5% the next day. This emotional volatility can push people to make bad decisions (pull all their money out, try to time the market, stop investing, etc.). Scheduling your investment into smaller sums lets you diffuse the highs and lows in order to keep you steadfast.

[orsorna]

If you only have a fixed amount of money to put aside every month, DCA makes sense. That applies to 99% of people. Not terrible at all.

[zrail]

That's not really DCA, at least how I understand it. DCA is something like "I have $520,000 in cash right now today sitting in checking, I'm going to buy $10,000 a week of VTSAX for the next 52 weeks" which on average is a bad strategy.

What you're describing is better analyzed as a continuing series of lump sum investments. You're investing as soon as you have cash available, not unnecessarily holding onto cash.

[BeetleB]

This is the original definition of DCA, but by this point most people view DCA as what everyone else in the thread is talking about.

Not a hill worth dying on.

[lotsofpulp]

That's not really choosing to "DCA", that's just not having enough money to not be able to "DCA".

Which is what's so funny about 99% of people that talk about DCA...they don't have any other option.