Great bumper sticker in 2001 was "God, one more bubble, this time I'll SELL."
Some interesting analysis I read was take $10K during the period of 1995 - 2000, invest it in tech stocks, sell them when it hit $15K, and invest $10K again in stocks, sell when it hit $15K, rinse and repeat. When the bubble bursts you lose all of your $10K investment, but in the last bubble you had put aside $25K in 'profits.' The point of the analysis was that sticking to goals and running your investing based on those goals was more effective in a bubble than 'going long' (as I did btw) The other key was that you did not try to 'amplify' your risk by selling and then investing all of the money you had ($15K after the first round) because that left money at risk. The money you pulled out had to go somewhere that was really solid (like an FDIC insured savings account or CD).
Perhaps I'll get a chance to try that strategy this round.
No, DCA is continually buying in "small" chunks to amortize the cost per security across a number of transactions which "smooths out" the noise of the purchase price into an average across all of the purchases.
This process is a 'rate capture' process, which is that a fixed amount of principle captures a moderately proportional fraction of the change in price. With a capture limit (in this case 50%)
I built a simple spreadsheet for you [1] which can illustrate this. In the spreadsheet there are two scenarios, one the person "pulls the trigger" every time their investments have grown by the target amount, pull off the growth and take it out of the game, and then go back in with their basic investment. In the second scenario they just let it grow and grow and grow. After 5 rounds with a growth target of 50% they have $35K if they regularly pull the trigger, and $75K if they let it ride (more money is in play so the same percentage increase in the market gets you more money back). When the bubble bursts, if you lose all of the money in play, you end up with $25K and $0.
You can play with the spreadsheet and make some other choices to see how they work out. The smaller your trigger point the closer you get to having identical returns because you're not getting any amplifying effect of the money allowed to grow, the larger the growth target the longer in time (generally) you have to wait before you can pull the trigger and like musical chairs find yourself losing out because you waited to long.
An interesting diversion is to run different investment strategies against the historical record from the bubble to see which left you with more money. If we are in another bubble that could be useful information.
Or not. See other posts on the randomness of it all.
Some interesting analysis I read was take $10K during the period of 1995 - 2000, invest it in tech stocks, sell them when it hit $15K, and invest $10K again in stocks, sell when it hit $15K, rinse and repeat. When the bubble bursts you lose all of your $10K investment, but in the last bubble you had put aside $25K in 'profits.' The point of the analysis was that sticking to goals and running your investing based on those goals was more effective in a bubble than 'going long' (as I did btw) The other key was that you did not try to 'amplify' your risk by selling and then investing all of the money you had ($15K after the first round) because that left money at risk. The money you pulled out had to go somewhere that was really solid (like an FDIC insured savings account or CD).
Perhaps I'll get a chance to try that strategy this round.