DCA for idiots...(meaning me)

am I the only one who doesn't really keep track? I just write down how much i spend in one column and keep running totals of my silver in another. maybe every couple months i see what the value of my stack is. when i sell some i just put minus $ and oz in each column.

 

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I don't. Except for tax purposes (if any) what you have paid for an investment becomes completely irrelevant the day that you acquire it. Its worth is now what you will sell it for. Your goal should be to maximize the future sales price rather than beating your purchase price. This sounds counter intuitive, but once purchased, you can now do nothing about that. Forgetting or not knowing this has tripped up many an investor.

 

yes, but learning from your mistakes is hard if you don't know when or how you made them.

 

There are two problems to this thinking in the context of this topic.

1. People who are focused on their purchase price either already know they made a mistake, or if not, then are blaming some external event for their demise and are not accepting that it was they who screwed up. In other words, given the same circumstances, they would repeat it. Look how many people think housing is a good deal because it has dropped 50% but completely ignore that it might drop even more.
2. If you are 'long' investing, such as bullion buying, then it becomes pretty difficult to learn anything from what you might have paid for something 5, 10, 15 years ago. What IS a mistake is in holding on to an investiment for that long, and potentially miss higher prices because you can't beat what you paid for it. This also describes many home buyers who have been riding prices down.