Rant: The whole dollar-cost averaging push feels like training wheels that never come off

Everyone tells new people to just set up automatic buys and never think about price, but how do you actually learn what a market feels like if you do that? It makes investing feel like a boring chore instead of something you can understand.

4 comments

4 Comments

the_dakota5h ago

Totally get what you mean about the training wheels thing. Setting up automatic buys just turns it into another background bill to pay, like your phone plan. You never learn to feel when a dip is actually scary or when a rally is getting silly. It just turns the whole market into a boring spreadsheet that updates in the background.

seanc732h ago

Take away the scary dips and crazy rallies, and you never learn what drives the market! It's like watching a movie on mute, you miss all the cues. Then when things go south, you have no idea how to react.

joseph4674h ago

Last quarter, I shifted 30% of my auto-invest cash to a manual trading pool. Lets you keep the baseline buys but still catch the real fear or excitement in big moves.

wendy_henderson214h ago

That "boring spreadsheet" is how most people avoid losing money trying to be clever.