For years I was that person:
“I don’t need Auto-Invest, I am the strategy.”
So I did the boring thing devs hate: I tracked both for 12 months — Auto-Invest vs my perfectly “rational” manual DCA.
Spoiler: the spreadsheet was not kind to me.
The Experiment 🧪
I ran two parallel approaches:
- Manual DCA – same coins, same target amounts, but buys done “when it feels right” (aka after 3 hours of chart staring).
- Auto-Invest – fixed rules:
- buy every week
- same amounts
- no feelings, no Twitter, no “this time is different”.
Same assets, same horizon. The only variable: me.
Where Manual DCA Failed (Aka: My Brain) 🧠💥
Patterns from the data:
- I delayed buys after dumps: “it might go lower”. Often it didn’t.
- I FOMO’d into green candles: “momentum is strong”. Momentum then died.
- I skipped entries during bad news, then bought higher once “it felt safer”.
On paper, I “timed the market”.
In reality, I paid a premium for emotion.
Where Auto-Invest Quietly Won 🤖✅
Auto-Invest didn’t care:
- red? buy
- green? buy
- boring crab? buy
It averaged into better prices than my manual genius most of the time — simply because it never skipped the ugly days (which, surprise, are often the best entries).
And here’s the important part:
For larger capital, Auto-Invest scales even better:
- big tickets get split across time automatically
- less slippage from one huge “YOLO buy”
- fewer catastrophic “I aped $50K at local top” moments
If you’re moving serious size, automation isn’t a luxury — it’s risk management.
What I Learned 🚦
- Manual DCA is great… until emotions show up.
- Auto-Invest is boring… and boring compounded over 12 months usually wins.
- The more capital you deploy, the more you want systems, not “good days”.
If you want a deeper, numbers-first breakdown of why Auto-Invest makes sense (especially for bigger investors), there’s a detailed article — highly recommend reading it before your next heroic manual “perfect entry” attempt 🚀
Top comments (0)