Dollar-cost averaging fails because it ignores price. A better approach buys only when the market drops below your last purchase, pulling your average cost down and turning weakness into planned advantage instead of fighting the market.
How do you flip this around and make DCA actually work for you? Well, what you do is you reverse the logic. Instead of buying simply because time has passed, you only add when price moves against you. Time doesn't matter. Each additional buy happens lower than the last, pulling your average cost down instead of pushing it up. Weakness stops being something you fear and becomes something that you can actually plan for. You're not trying to catch the bottom, you're just making sure that every move gives you more room to recover and a cleaner path to exit when the strength returns, not only when the market makes a new all high.
