At 15:00 UTC on Wednesday, the much-anticipated Zhejiang testnet for staking withdrawal went live on Ethereum’s Beacon chain. Zhejiang will enable the testing of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4895 which allows for staking withdrawals. This is in preparation for the network’s next major update, the Shanghai hard fork slated to launch sometime in March. Users Can Make Simulated Withdrawals with Zhejiang In a tweet yesterday, DevOps engineer at Ethereum foundation Barnabas Busa gave details about the Zhejiang testnet slated…
What is Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA)?
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is an investment strategy in which an investor divides the total amount of money to be invested across periodic purchases of a particular asset, regardless of the asset’s price. The goal of this strategy is to reduce the impact of volatility on the overall purchase.
How Does it work?
Here’s an example of how Dollar cost averaging works with a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin:
- Let’s say you have $10,000 that you want to invest in Bitcoin.
- Instead of buying all the Bitcoins at once, you decide to use dollar cost averaging and invest $2,000 every month for the next five months.
- The price of Bitcoin is $50,000 at the time of your first investment, so you buy 40 Bitcoins.
- The next month, the price of Bitcoin dropped to $40,000, so you buy 50 Bitcoins.
- The following month, the price of Bitcoin has risen to $60,000, so you buy 33.333 Bitcoins.
- And so on for the next two months.
Using dollar cost averaging in this example, you have reduced the impact of the price fluctuations on your investment. For example, if you had bought all of the Bitcoins at once at the beginning when the price was $50,000, you would have bought 20 Bitcoins less than by using dollar cost averaging. Also, by spreading the purchase across time, you have avoided the possibility of buying at the top of a market cycle.
You should research and assess your risk tolerance before making any investment. Also, this example doesn’t consider the real-life costs that can happen, like trading fees, taxes, etc. So depending on your situation, the real outcome could differ.
In summary, Dollar cost averaging is a technique used to average out the purchase price of an asset over some time. It could help reduce the volatility of the investment by spreading the investment over time, which may make investing in a volatile asset such as cryptocurrency less stressful.