The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Notes -
I feel like that article's example is chosen more for shock value than truth, though. Practically, they only invest a single time for almost 15 years, even though it's a big amount, does that really reflect true investor behavior (saving in the meantime)? Not only staying put for a while, but your income won't stay the same over time, so even though they inflation-adjusted the core stock market measure, it's not going to be anything remotely like "I have 40k right now or I could strategically invest it over time in equal lumps on the dips" since that 40k is already inflation-corrected, you'd never have that to start with, so to me something feels a bit wrong in the setup. At any rate most people aren't debating between saving until a major dip and investing each month. Most people are debating between investing a lump sum all at once, or doing a structured investment. That is, I have 10k in savings, do I buy now or do I split it up into some number of equal parts over days/weeks/months? Notably both this more limited entry strategy and investing your extra every month ad infinitum are both sometimes referred to as dollar cost averaging, confusingly, since they represent two quite fundamentally different use-cases and setups.
Although a similar logic applies in the structured investment case, where the lump sum technically wins out mathematically, and the longer the time horizon the more this is true (somewhat counterintuitively), it's still worth noting that a structured deposit does offer both a decrease in risk as well as some emotional benefits (provided you actually stick to the structured deposit schedule without overthinking, which is a major doubt considering they're more also probably more risk-averse and overthinking in the first place). Overall I think the math says the risk decrease is overstated, so really it just comes down to emotions. Consider the worst-case scenario and if your precise entry strategy would have made an emotional difference or not, and then consider the best-case scenario and if you'd feel substantial regret not earning more. Only the investor themselves can say, but e.g. this Vanguard paper makes the claim that assuming you don't have loss aversion (which is to some extent irrational for most investors) only "very conservative" risk tolerance people should bother to DCA and also puts some numbers to it (see page 6 for some sexy money curves).
ninja edit: fixed objection about inflation
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