The term “Dollar Cost Averaging,” or DCA for short, refers to a strategy for purchasing precious metals. Spot price for bullion fluctuates throughout the year, and when you have the money to purchase bullion may not coincide with when it’s at its cheapest price. There are two main buying strategies proposed to counter this issue.
Traditional Dollar Cost Averaging
This strategy is simple and has its merits. The idea is you simply purchase bullion at a pre-decided pace based on your personal budget, regardless of what spot price does. The idea behind this is that in the course of a year, your average cost for purchasing the bullion will be only slightly higher than the lowest spot prices for the year, and considerably lower than the highest spot prices of the year. This is a “Slow and steady wins the race” approach to stacking.
“Keep Your Powder Dry” Averaging
This shares the common strategy of always making regular purchases based on your budget, but at a slightly reduced amount. The reason for this is to simultaneously save up cash reserves for when the spot price takes a considerable dip in price.
Once you identify a down trend in spot price, the idea is to use these reserve cash funds to “buy the dip.” Once this happens, there are two strategies people will typically follow.
- Some will choose to go all-in and hope they bought before the price bottoms out and starts to climb back up.
- Others will use the cash reserves to incrementally buy as the price trends down, and continue buying until it starts to climb back up considerably.
Both strategies work. Some choose the first option because they don’t think they’ll be able to time the dip and get in quickly. Others choose the second option because they’ll still purchase gold, silver or other precious metals cheap, and if spot price still has further to drop when they notice the down trend and buy, they can take advantage of further cheaper prices. If their timing isn’t quite right, they still get it relatively cheap and buy before spot price climbs up much further.
Which strategy works best for you really comes down to budget, how frequently you plan to make purchases, and how much you want to watch and time the market to make your purchases.