Dollar-cost averaging: How often should one use it? What criteria to use when choosing stocks to apply it to?
"Why do people keep talking about 401K's at work?  That is NOT dollar cost averaging.  DCA refers to when you have a large sum of money.  Do you invest it all at once or spread it out over several smaller purchases over a period of time?  There really isn't a ""when"" should I use it.  It is simply a matter of where your preferences lie on the risk/reward scpectrum.  DCA has lower risk and lower reward than lump sum investing.  In my opinion, I don't like it.  DCA only works better than lump sum investing if the price drops.  But if you think the price is going to drop, why are you buying the stock in the first place? Example: Your uncle wins the lottery and gives you $50,000.  Do you buy $50,000 worth of Apple now, or do you buy $10,000 now and $10,000 a quarter for the next four quarters? If the stock goes up, you will make more with lump-sum(LS) than you will with DCA. If the stock goes down, you will lose more with LS than you will with DCA. If the stock goes up then down, you will lose more with DCA than you will with LS. If the stock goes down then up, you will make more with DCA than you will with LS. So it's a tradeoff.  But, like I said, the whole point of you buying the stock is that you think it's going to go up! So why pick the strategy that performs worse in that scenario?" Dollar cost averaging is a great strategy to use for investment vehicles where you can't invest it in a lump sum. A 401K is perfect for this. You take a specific amount out of each paycheck and invest it either in a single  fund, or multiple funds, or some programs let you invest it in a brokerage account so you can invest in virtually any mutual fund or stock. With annual or semi-annual re-balancing of your investments dollar cost averaging is the way to invest in these programs. If you have a lump sum to invest, then dollar cost averaging is not the best way to invest. Imagine you want to invest 10K and you want to be 50% bonds and 50% stocks. Under dollar cost averaging you would take months to move the money from 100% cash to 50/50 bonds/stocks. While you are slowly moving towards the allocation you want, you will spend months not in the allocation you want. You will spend way too long in the heavy cash position you were trying to change. The problem works the other way also. Somebody trying to switch from stocks to gold a few years ago, would not have wanted to stay in limbo for months. Obviously day traders don't use dollar cost averaging. If you will will be a frequent trader, DCA is not the way to go.  No particular stock type is better for DCA. It is dependent on how long you plan on keeping the investment, and if you will be working with a lump sum or not. EDIT: There have be comments regarding DCA and 401Ks. When experts discuss why people should invest via a 401K, they mention DCA as a plus along with the company match. Many participants walk away with the belief that DCA is the BEST strategy. Many articles have been written about how to invest an inheritance or tax refund, many people want to use DCA because they believe that it is good. In fact in the last few years the experts have begun to discourage ever using DCA unless there is no other way. "How often should one use dollar-cost averaging? Trivially, a dollar cost averaging (DCA) strategy must be  used at least twice! More seriously, DCA is a discipline that people (typically investors with relatively small amounts of money to invest each month or each quarter)  use to avoid succumbing to the temptation to ""time the market"".  As mhoran_psprep points out, it is well-suited to 401k plans and the like (e.g. 403b plans for educational and non-profit institutions, 457 plans for State employees, etc), and indeed is actually  the default option in such plans, since a fixed amount of money gets invested each week, or every  two weeks, or every month depending on the payroll schedule. Many plans offer just a few mutual funds in which to invest, though far too many people, having little knowledge or understanding of  investments, simply opt for the money-market fund or guaranteed annuity fund in their 4xx plans.  In any case, all your money goes to work immediately since all mutual funds let you invest in thousandths of a share. Some 401k/403b/457 plans allow investments in stocks through a brokerage, but I think that using DCA to  buy individual stocks in a retirement plan is not a good  idea at all. The reasons for this are that not only must shares must be bought in whole numbers (integers) but it is generally cheaper to buy stocks in round lots  of 100 (or multiples of 100) shares rather than in odd lots of, say, 37 shares. So buying stocks weekly, or biweekly or monthly in a 401k plan means paying more or having the money sit idle until enough is accumulated to buy 100 shares of a stock at which point the brokerage executes the order to buy the stock; and this is really not DCA at all.  Worse yet, if you let the money accumulate but you are the one calling the shots ""Buy 100 shares of APPL today"" instead of letting the brokerage execute the order when there is enough money, you are likely to  be timing the market instead of doing DCA. So, are brokerages useless in retirement fund accounts?  No, they can be useful but they are not suitable for DCA strategies involving buying stocks. Stick to mutual funds for DCA. Do people use it across the board on all stock investments? As indicated above, using DCA to buy individual stocks is not the best idea, regardless of whether it is done inside a retirement plan or outside. DCA outside a retirement plan works best if you not trust yourself to stick with the strategy (""Ooops, I forgot to mail the check yesterday; oh, well, I will do it next week"") but rather, arrange for your mutual fund company to take the money out of your checking account each week/month/quarter etc, and invest it in whatever fund(s) you have chosen. Most companies have such programs under names such as Automatic Investment Program (AIP) etc. Why not have your bank send the money to the mutual fund company instead? Well, that works too, but my bank charges me for sending the money whereas my mutual fund company does AIP for free. But YMMV. Dollar-cost averaging generally means investing  a fixed amount of money on a periodic basis. An alternative strategy, if one has decided that owning 1200 shares of FlyByKnight Co is a good investment to have, is to buy round lots of 100 shares of FBKCO each month. The amount of money invested each month varies, but at the end of the year, the average cost of the 1200 shares is the average of the prices on the 12 days on which the investments were made. Of course, by the end of the year, you might not think FBKCO is worth holding any more. This technique worked best in the  ""good old days"" when blue-chip stocks  paid what was for all practical purposes a guaranteed dividend each year, and people bought these stocks with the intention of passing them on to their widows and children." Dollar cost averaging can be done in a retirement plan, and can be done for individual stock purchases, as this will increase your returns by reducing your risk, especially if you are buying a particular stock for the first time.   How many time have I purchased a stock, bottom fishing, thinking I was buying at the low, only to find out there was a new low.  Sitting with a thousand shares that are now down $3-$4K.  I have a choice to sell at a loss, hold what I've got or double down.  I usually add more shares if I'm thinking I'll recover, but at that time I'd wished I'd eased into my investment.  That way I would have owned more shares at a smaller cost basis.   Anything can happen in the market, not knowing whether the price will increase or decrease.  In the example above a $3,000 loss is equal to the brokerage cost of about 300 trades, so trading cost should not be a factor.  Now I'm not saying to slowly get into the market and miss the bull, like we're having today with Trump, but get into individual stocks slowly, being fully invested in the market.   Also DCA means you do not buy equal number of shares per period, say monthly, but that you buy with the same amount of money a different number of shares, reducing your total costs.  Let's say you spend $2000 on a stock trading at $10 (200 shares), if the stock rose to $20 you would spend $2000 and buy 100 shares, and if the stock dropped to $5 you would spend $2000 and buy 400 shares, by now having amassed 700 shares for $6,000.  On the other hand and in contrast to DCA had you purchased 200 shares for $2000 at $10/share, then 200 shares for $4000 at $20/share, and finally 200 more shares for $1000 at $5/share, you would have amassed only 600 shares for $7000 investment.
I think the list could have added:  - Save in regular intervals using the same strategy.  Just to make sure that good old dollar cost averaging is thrown in. That's probably where most people go way wrong. Save money all year, dump it on a stock they like because some family friend investment expert said that 'apple prices will go up' with out explaining that you need to take advantage of mean reversion to help spread the risk. "As Dheer pointed out, the top ten mega-cap corporations account for a huge part (20%) of your ""S&P 500"" portfolio when weighted proportionally. This is one of the reasons why I have personally avoided the index-fund/etf craze -- I don't really need another mechanism to buy ExxonMobil, IBM and Wal-Mart on my behalf. I like the equal-weight concept -- if I'm investing in a broad sector (Large Cap companies), I want diversification across the entire sector and avoid concentration. The downside to this approach is that there will be more portfolio turnover (and expense), since you're holding more shares of the lower tranches of the index where companies are more apt to churn. (ie. #500 on the index gets replaced by an up and comer). So you're likely to have a higher expense ratio, which matters to many folks." "Forecasts of stock market direction are not reliable, so you shouldn't be putting much weight on them.  Long term, you can expect to do better in stocks, but obtaining this better expected return has the danger of ""buying in"" to the market at a particularly bad moment, leading to a substantially lower return.  So mitigate that risk while moving in a big piece of cash by ""dollar cost averaging"".  An example would be to divide your cash hoard (conceptually) into say six pieces, and invest each piece in the index fund two months apart.  After a year you will have invested the whole sum at about the average of the index for the year." "Personally, I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle.  You're somewhat correct in assuming that what you're reading is usually some kind of marketing material.  Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) is not a universal piece of jargon in the financial world.  Dollar cost averaging is a pretty universal piece of jargon in the financial world and is a common topic taught in finance classes in the US. On average, verified by many studies, individuals will generate better investment returns when they proactively avoid timing the market or attempting to pick specific winners.  Say you decide to invest in a mutual fund, dollar cost averaging means you invest the same dollar amount in consistent intervals rather than buying a number of shares or buying sporadically when you feel the market is low. As an example I'll compare investing $50 per week on Wednesdays, versus 1 share per week on Wednesdays, or the full $850 on the first Wednesday.   I'll use the Vanguard Large cap fund as an example (VLCAX).  I realize this is not really an apples to apples comparison as the invested amounts are different, I just wanted to show how your rate of return can change depending on how your money goes in to the market even if the difference is subtle.  By investing a common dollar amount rather than a common share amount you ultimately maintain a lower average share price while the share price climbs.  It also keeps your investment easy to budget. Vanguard published an excellent paper discussing dollar cost averaging versus lump sum investing which concluded that you should invest as soon as you have funds, rather than parsing out a lump sum in to smaller periodic investments, which is illustrated in the third column above; and obviously worked out well as the market has been increasing. Ultimately, all of these companies are vying to customers so they all have marketing teams trying to figure out how to make their services sound interesting and unique.  If they all called dollar cost averaging, ""dollar cost averaging"" none of them would appear to be unique.  So they devise neat acronyms but it's all pretty much the same idea.  Trickle your money in to your investments as the money becomes available to you." You will maximize your expected wealth by investing all the money you intend to invest, as soon as you have it available. Don't let the mythos of dollar cost averaging induce you to allocate more much money to a savings account than is optimal.  If you want the positive expected return of the market, don't put your money in a savings account.  That's especially true now, when you are certainly earning a negative real interest rate on your savings account. Dollar cost averaging and putting all your money in at the beginning would have the same expected return except that if you put all your money in earlier, it spends more time in the market, so your expected return is higher.  Your volatility is also higher (because your savings account would have very low volatility) but your preference for investment tells me that you view the expected return and volatility tradeoff of the stock market as acceptable. If you need something to help you feel less stress about investing right away, think of it as dollar cost averaging on a yearly basis instead of monthly.  Further, you take take comfort in knowing that you have allocated your wealth as you can instead of letting it fizzle away in real terms in a bank account. Dollar cost averaging is an great way to diversify your investment risk.  There's mainly 2 things you want to achieve when you're saving for retirement: 1) Keep your principal investment; 2) Grow it.  The best methods recommended by most financial institutions are as follows:  1) Diversification;  2) Re-balance. There are a lot of additional recommendations, but these are my main take away.  When you dollar cost average, you're essentially diversifying your exchange risk between the value of the funds you're investing.   Including the ups and downs of the value of the underlying asset, may actually be re-balancing.  Picking your asset portfolio: 1) You generally want to include within your 401k or any other invest, classes of investments that do not always move in total correlation as this allows you to diversify risk; 2) I'm making a lot of assumptions here - since you may have already picked your asset classes.  Consider utilizing the following to tell you when to buy or sell your underlying investment: 1) Google re-balance excel sheet to find several examples of re-balance tools to help you always buy low and sell high;   2) Enter your portfolio investment; 3) Utilize the movement to invest in the underlying assets based on market movement; and 4) Execute in an emotionless way and stick to your plan.  Example -  Facts 1) I have 1 CAD and 1 USD in my 401k.  Plan I will invest 1 dollar in the ratio of 50/50 - forever.   Let's start in 2011 since we were closer to par: 2010 - 1 CAD (value 1 USD) and 1 USD (value 1 USD) = 50/50 ratio 2011 start  - 1 CAD ( value .8 USD) and 1 USD (value 1 USD) = 40/60 ratio 2011 - rebalance - invest 1 USD as follows purchase .75 CAD (.60 USD) and purchase .40 USD = total of 1 USD reinvested 2011 end - 1.75 CAD (value 1.4USD) and 1.4 USD (value 1.4 USD) - 50/50 ratio As long as the fundamentals of your underlying assets (i.e. you're not expecting hyperinflation or your asset to approach 0), this approach will always build value over time since you're always buying low and selling high while dollar averaging.  Keep in mind it does reduce your potential gains - but if you're looking to max gain, it may mean you're also max potential loss - unless you're able to find A symmetrical investments.  I hope this helps. "Ryan's suggestion to index for your main strategy is dead on. Your risk is highest with one given stock, and decreases as you diversify. Yet, picking the stocks one at a time is an effort, when done right, it's time consuming. For what one can say about Jim ""mad money"" Cramer, his advice to spend an hour a month studying each stock you own, is pretty decent advice.  Penny stocks are sub one dollar priced, typically small companies which in theory can grow to be large companies, but the available information tends to be tougher to get hold of.  Options are a discussion for a different thread, I discussed the covered call strategy elsewhere and show that options are not necessarily high risk, it depends how they are used." "Check out Professor Damodaran's website: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ . Tons of good stuff there to get you started. If you want more depth, he's written what is widely considered the bible on the subject of valuation: ""Investment Valuation"". DCF is very well suited to stock analysis. One doesn't need to know, or forecast the future stock price to use it. In fact, it's the opposite. Business fundamentals are forecasted to estimate the sum total of future cash flows from the company, discounted back to the present. Divide that by shares outstanding, and you have the value of the stock. The key is to remember that DCF calculations are very sensitive to inputs. Be conservative in your estimates of future revenue growth, earnings margins, and capital investment. I usually develop three forecasts: pessimistic, neutral, optimistic. This delivers a range of value instead of a false-precision single number. This may seem odd: I find the DCF invaluable, but for the process, not so much the result. The input sensitivity requires careful work, and while a range of value is useful, the real benefit comes from being required to answer the questions to build the forecast. It provides a framework to analyze a business. You're just trying to properly fill in the boxes, estimate the unguessable. To do so, you pore through the financials. Skimming, reading with a purpose. In the end you come away with a fairly deep understanding of the business, how they make money, why they'll continue to make money, etc." "Dollar cost averaging is a fancy name someone came up with to say ""Invest all of the time"". I would not bother with spreading out purchases. If the market is too expensive right now ...so what? The items you sell will bring top dollar. The fund you buy will cost top dollar. It all evens out.  You could sell your assets and just sit on cash, but that would require knowing when the next market drop is coming..which no one knows. Also, it never really is cash; it goes into a money market fund which is not guaranteed. I would rather own companies(VSTAX) and collect the dividend." Edit3: Regarding the usefulness of the bare number itself, it is not useful unless, for example, an employer uses that average in the computation of how many options the employer grants to the employee as part of the compensation paid. One of my employers used just such an average. What is far more common is to use two or more moving averages, of different periods, plotted on a chart.  My original response continues below... Assuming there are 252 trading days a year, the following chart does what you have done but with a moving average: AAPL on Stockcharts.com  Edit: BTW, I looked up the number of Federal holidays, there are 9. The average year has 365.2422 days. 365.2422 × 5/7 = 260.8873. Subtract 9 and you get 251.8873 trading days in the average year. So 252 is a better number for the SMA than 250 if you want to average a year.  Edit2: Here is the same chart with more than one average included: AAPL chart w/indicators Quick and dirty paper but pretty interesting.. I'm not in Portfolio Management but I probably would have ended up at the modal number as well.   I don't know the subject deeply enough to answer my own question, but is the bias always toward underestimation of variance? Or is that a complex of the way the problem was set up?   Another question I have for those in investment management; Would this impact asset allocation? In general, lump sum investing will tend to outperform dollar cost averaging because markets tend to increase in value, so investing more money earlier will generally be a better strategy.  The advantage of dollar cost averaging is that it protects you in times when markets are overvalued, or prior to market corrections.   As an extreme example, if you done a lump-sum investment in late 2008 and then suffered through the subsequent market crash, it may have taken you 2-3 years to get back to even.  If you began a dollar cost averaging investment plan in late 2008, it may have only taken you a 6 months to get back to even. Dollar cost averaging can also help to reduce the urge to time the market, which for most investors is definitely a good thing. "Trying to ""time the market"" is usually a bad idea. People who do this every day for a living have a hard time doing that, and I'm guessing you don't have that kind of time and knowledge.  So that leaves you with your first and third options, commonly called lump-sum and dollar cost averaging respectively.   Which one to use depends on where your preferences lie on the risk/reward scpectrum. Dollar cost averaging (DCA) has lower risk and lower reward than lump sum investing. In my opinion, I don't like it. DCA only works better than lump sum investing if the price drops. But if you think the price is going to drop, why are you buying the stock in the first place? Example: Your uncle wins the lottery and gives you $50,000. Do you buy $50,000 worth of Apple now, or do you buy $10,000 now and $10,000 a quarter for the next four quarters? If the stock goes up, you will make more with lump-sum(LS) than you will with DCA. If the stock goes down, you will lose more with LS than you will with DCA. If the stock goes up then down, you will lose more with DCA than you will with LS. If the stock goes down then up, you will make more with DCA than you will with LS. So it's a trade-off. But, like I said, the whole point of you buying the stock is that you think it's going to go up, which is especially true with an index fund! So why pick the strategy that performs worse in that scenario?" "Beatrice does a good job of summarizing things.  Tracking the index yourself is expensive (transaction costs) and tedious (number of transactions, keeping up with the changes, etc.)  One of the points of using an index fund is to reduce your workload.  Diversification is another point, though that depends on the indexes that you decide to use.  That said, even with a relatively narrow index you diversify in that segment of the market. A point I'd like to add is that the management which occurs for an index fund is not exactly ""active.""  The decisions on which stocks to select are already made by the maintainers of the index.  Thus, the only management that has to occur involves the trades required to mimic the index." Since I am no longer a minor, can I start contributing to this account right away and claim tax relief for my contributions?  Yes Do I need to submit some paperwork to the bank  Not to my knowledge. Best check with Bank. What will be the features of such a PPF account with respect to maturity, withdrawals, interest, tax on interest, etc. No difference. i.e. the Account would continue, as it was opened 10 years back, it would mature in another 5 years. You can extend this by a block of 5 years as long as required. The withdrawals are tax free in your hands including interest.