"buying the dip" is HORRIBLE advice for most people (here’s why)
In this video Roman Ceccardi argues that dollar‑cost averaging (DCA) – often phrased as “buying the dip” – is a fundamentally flawed strategy for most crypto investors. Drawing on his personal trading history (turning $20k into $1M before age 21, a 78% win‑rate on publicly called trades, and later large losses), he explains why DCA typically loses money: crypto’s 4‑year Bitcoin‑driven boom‑bust cycles, the inability to reliably identify bottoms, and the high volatility of most tokens, many of which he characterises as “Ponzi‑like”. He illustrates the danger of leveraged DCA with a concrete example (2× leverage on Popcat leading to liquidation) and discusses the psychological and capital‑drain consequences of repeatedly buying into falling markets. As an alternative, he proposes waiting for a confirmed trend reversal (higher highs/lower lows on weekly charts) before allocating capital, focusing on established assets (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana) and then holding for the next upward phase, which he estimates can yield 3‑5× returns over a 4‑year cycle. He also promotes his own trading program that claims a 78% win‑rate and helps students become funded traders. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to ask questions, like, and share the content.
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If you're a fan of making money, like dollar cost averaging has got to be one of the most stupid things that you could possibly do, especially when it comes to crypto. Now this also applies generally to you know any market in general, but dollar cost average is going to lose you money for most people. Like for 90% of people watching this, it's going to lose you money, and I'm going to break it all down in this video. But just right before I get into this, welcome. I've been in crypto since I've been through like three entire like bull and bear markets so far. I've made I've turned $20,000 into a million dollars all before I turned 21, and right now I'm just. Just making a really good living, like trading in general. And by the way, I've also been making like daily videos just on this YouTube channel calling like, hey, this is what Bitcoin's going to do today. And we've been trading it. And so far in the last year and a half, I've actually publicly documented the results of these trade calls that I make daily. And we're at around a 78% win rate. Just to share that, hey, I'm not some random gooner in some, you know, my mom's basement or whatever. And like, you know, maybe I'm worth listening to. But anyways, just, you know, to dive into the video. This one was inspired by this comment right here saying that, hey, I've always been excited for your videos and amongst everyone you are my favorite, bro, shout out to you. If at any point in this video you see a little bit of frustration come out, it's not directed at you. It's just I wish dollar cost, like this entire misconception about dollar cost averaging, I just wish more people in crypto knew about it because like it's kind of like the common advice that everyone gets and yet people don't realize that it may be hurting them. And I'm gonna give you not only the reasons why, I'm also gonna give you a better alternative. And in fact, like for the people that dollar cost averaging might actually be suitable for. I'm going to break it all down. So it's not necessarily that dollar cost averaging is like 100% bad. It's just for most cases, it's not the optimal, it's not the optimal kind of like strategy when it comes to just making money, either investing in crypto or just investing in general. So anyways, just going back to that YouTube comment, uh, today I wanted to ask you whether I can take leverage of 2x, right? If I use 2x leverage on Bitcoin and I'll just keep buying in. So as Bitcoin drops, I could just continue to buy at $50K and just keep buying lower until it goes down. But I'm going to do all of this at 2x leverage. And this video was You know, it was about leverage and risk, right? And he was asking this question, which by the way, shout out to you. Thanks for asking this question. I actually gave you a pretty long reply, but I just thought this would be worth making a video about just because of how widely misunderstood this entire concept of low leverage into dollar cost averaging is. And by the way, this YouTube video funnily enough was inspired by this comment right here on X where he was talking about how I don't get how 4% is too high. And so I explained that as well as this other guy here. Whoa, because this guy's using 200x leverage. Oh, 200x is gambling. Those next 200x will be a loss. So, I actually made this YouTube video to address those misconceptions, and now I'm making this YouTube video to address this misconception. So, we're having like inception here. We can definitely make this a running thing where like if you guys are watching this video and if you have any questions at all, it doesn't have to be related to the topic of this video, but if you have a question, drop it down. Like if it inspires me to make a video about it, I'm more than happy to just answer the question in depth. Anyways, let's just get right into the actual topic of the video. Why is dollar cost averaging such a terrible idea for most people? Well, you have to think of it this way, right? If you look at it, like if you look at any major kind of like bear market or any major market or like at any point in time, how confident are you? Like obviously if you look back in hindsight, it's like, oh yeah, the bottom of 2022 is, you know, $15,000. But if you actually look back at that time, like how confident were you when you looked at price? Like, hey, I'm going all in on this. Or like, hey, I'm buying in. Chances are for 99% of people, including myself, I don't know. And that's also perfectly fine because there is nobody on this planet that can consistently catch kind of like bottoms or tops correctly. The easiest way that I can put this for you is think back to how many times you have tried to buy a dip before. How many times have you actually found that once you buy the dip, it just continues dipping and it's not until, you know, months later, or especially with crypto, how many positions are you still holding from the 2021 bull market that has not yet come even close to recovering like its full potential? Or heck, even in 2024, right? That was back during like meme coin season. Everyone like WIF and Popcat and all of these coins were like hyped to the moon. And sure, they did amazingly well, but throughout the whole of 2025, they actually lost more than 90-95% of their value. In fact, let me just go on to Popcat, for example. And yeah, yeah, look at this. Imagine if you bought the dip, right? And let's say you make a, you know, kind of like arbitrary, just kind of like buy the dip kind of moment. Okay, you saw that Popcat went all the way up to $2. So okay, I think that, you know, $1 is a fair price to buy for Popcat. And so I'm just going to buy the dip there. So I use 2x leverage, right? That's pretty low. It should be pretty safe. Guess what? You would be absolutely liquidated like 4 weeks later. And this is not a limited example. Again, think back to your own experience. How many times have you tried to buy the dip just to see it dip lower? Because the truth is nobody knows where the bottom is, especially when it comes to crypto where there is absolutely no notion of what is fair price. Like, just to explain what I mean there, if you take a look at the stock market, right, you take a look at the NASDAQ, Okay, it's made up of the top, like, what, 100 tech companies, or like the top 100 companies in the USA. And if you look at that, you can go into every single company and you can look at, you know, how much profit are they earning. You can see that, you know, these companies are genuinely making a difference in the world by, you know, developing new AI products. I know AI is a bubble, AI is a bit overvalued at the moment. Stay with me. You can look at, you know, companies like Coca-Cola, right? They're producing drinks. Not to say that they're healthy, but they're doing something and they're providing genuine value to the economy and to the world. But crypto, fuck that. What utility does this have? Nothing other than the fact that this is a bit of a Ponzi scheme, or this is just a bit of a game of like, of like who can kind of catch the top and then, you know, sell before dumping it on everyone else, right? And that's the case for 99.99% of crypto. Now, even on the ones where there is like a real use case, it doesn't matter because crypto is still fundamentally tied to a 4-year cycle of Bitcoin, which by the way, if you don't know what that means, essentially Bitcoin has, you know, kind of like a 4-year cycle of boom and bust where Every 4 years, you get 1 or 2 years where it is kind of accumulating at the bottom of the bear market. You get a year where things are going absolutely sky high, and then you get a year where it's just dropping. 4-year cycle. Now, because everything is so heavily tied to Bitcoin, what ends up happening is that altcoins also follow. They're forced to follow this kind of boom and bust cycle regardless of how good the utility is. Look at coins like Solana or Ethereum or Hyperliquid. It's hard to argue that they don't have utility because the truth is people are using the product not only to build new, you know, kind of solutions, but also just in general, like to transact, to, you know, Hyperliquid, it's an exchange. It's genuinely a pretty good exchange, right? People use it. It has real value. It doesn't matter. But anyways, I'm driving a little bit too far from the point right here. Just understand that, like, just think back to how many times you've actually bought the dip and it never works because nobody actually understands how low things can go. Think about it another way, right? Everyone struggles with one thing during a bull market, which is a lot of people end up selling too soon or, you know, too late. Statistically speaking, most people get this wrong. And even if you just look at dips, nobody knows where the bottom is. So why would it— like, why would dollar-cost averaging be a smart move? If you want to think about it another way, you are essentially buying into a token and you are doubling down the worse that it performs. Like, let that sink in for a moment. You are investing more into an asset that is clearly performing Worse over time. Now, that's the part that really baffles my mind, right? For me, I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have to hold bags for like a year or 2 years with no guarantee that it's even going to return back to my entry point. Ideally, I would like to jump into a train that is ideally moving somewhere good and just kind of hopping on for the journey and then getting off at some point. I'd much rather— I don't know about you, but I'd much rather buy into a coin or a chart that is clearly in an uptrend and then just sell. At some point, rather than try to take a bet and predict where the bottom may be and to get stuck holding bags for like years upon years and potentially losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I say this because I actually did that. Like, just to give you some context, back in 2021, like, that was the year where, you know, I basically turned $20,000 all the way to like a million, all in the span of like 6 to 8 months, because that was the peak of the bull market. What the problem was, like, it felt great. Yes, it was a good achievement. Yes, I also ended up losing like more than half of that dollar amount over the course of the next 12 months. Because I kind of applied the same logic in a bull market where, okay, I just need to buy the dip, right? And market will go up eventually. What I failed to realize was that during a bear market, because you're in a downtrend, you are gonna keep going, like a downtrend will keep going into a downtrend until proven otherwise, right? It's kind of like the law of inertia or whatever. An object that stays in motion has a tendency to want to remain in motion. And in the case of the markets, the way it works is that anything that is in an uptrend has a tendency to want to stay in an uptrend until eventually it changes, right? So the big problem with what I did at the time was I was buying into a market that was fundamentally dropping. I did it because, you know, my indicators were telling me that, okay, this price is going to be, you know, fair value, or like this is going to be a good price, or this is going to be a good reversal point. I also did it because I followed people on X and on YouTube that said, okay, this is a smart investment because of this utility and that utility. It doesn't matter if the market's in a downtrend, you're just going to continue losing money if you buy in too early. So then there comes the other kind of like, uh, point of argument, right? The people that dollar cost average into this, you know, usually they'll either say one of two things, right? Either they don't have a better strategy to follow, that's why they're dollar cost averaging, or the other one that, you know, has a little bit more self-awareness, they will tend to say that, okay, I'm dollar cost averaging right now because I have a long-term outlook for Bitcoin, or like I have a long-term outlook for whatever asset that I'm buying into, right? I don't care if it does nothing for the next 5 years. Point number one is that 99% of people, that is not true. Like if you're under the age of like 65, where you're not retired and you're just, you know, swimming in cash, you care about what happens in the next 5 years, right? Ideally, and especially, you are going to care if your money is like down like 90-95% within the span of like 12 months. So let's get that out of the way. You do care about your money, right? Most of you watching this do care about the performance of whatever that coin is over the next, you know, 12 months or so. It's very rare to meet someone that is actually like just completely like, you know, I don't really care what happens to this money. Like I'm already good, I'm already set, I'm retired, I have everything sorted. I could lose everything and it'll be fine. And even for those people, ideally they don't want to lose their money, right? Ideally. Now that that's out of the way, let's move on to the second thing that these people tend to say. Whoa, this coin or this thing is revolutionary. It is going to change the AI data layer on the cloud with Web 3.5 or whatever. Yes, I understand that, you know, this coin has managed to, you know, paint a very grand vision of, you know, what it's able to achieve. But it still doesn't change the fact that you are still bound by the crypto boom and bust cycle, which is kind of like one of the big reasons why you like DCA is just absolutely stupid. Because if you take a look at the crypto boom and bust cycle, right, you can't invest with a 5-year timeline if 2 or 3 of those years, whatever asset that you're going to be investing into is going to drop like 80 to 90% with no guarantee of recovering. There is no other market in the world that does this. Now for those markets, right, let's say you're dollar-cost averaging into the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ, great, all power to you. Again, that's a real index of real companies that have been so established and they have provided so much value to the world that they managed to make it onto the biggest index in the world. So it's fair to dollar-cost average into that. But in crypto, you are dollar-cost averaging, like you're investing into a house of cards. There is no inherent value in any crypto token regardless of what they say or regardless of what they market it as. 99.99% of crypto tokens are just, are just that, they're just a Ponzi scheme. So that coupled with the fact that, you know, every 4 years there is going to be 1 or 2 years where it's going to lose 90% of the value, like you're starting to see how this just does not make logical sense, especially if you're a fan of making money. And this was one of the biggest lessons that I've had to learn the hard way. Again, I lost close to $1 million thanks to, you know, not understanding this. But ever since I, you know, went through that back in 2022, 2023, and A, I understand now that as much as I— name of the channel is like The Art of Crypto— as much as as long as I've been in crypto, I don't actually care about the tech of crypto. Like, if you ask me what Solana does, like, I know some stuff, but like, I don't— I sure as hell am not going to talk about, you know, the technicals of like, oh, this kind of like, oh, transaction limit, or like how many transactions can it handle per second. Like, I don't know, and I don't care, because at the end of the day, nothing matters more than the actual price action, especially if you're looking to make money. So now that I've said this, right, so what has been to change my approach, right? And the answer is gonna be simple. It's gonna be so simple that it's potentially gonna shock you, which is you simply buy back into the market once you get a confirmed reversal. That's it. So for example, right now on Bitcoin, right, I am like, I am 99% stablecoins at the moment. And all I'm waiting for, like, I'm not even looking to dollar cost average into Bitcoin. I'm not even looking to buy into anything at all until the trend changes. And for now, you can take a look here. It's clearly higher low, higher— sorry, lower low, lower high, lower low, lower high, right? Now this changes at some point when you get a higher high, and then on the lower low there is when at the very least you do need some sort of a higher high. Until I see that on the weekly chart, I'm not touching anything. Because here's what you also need to understand about, you know, crypto money flow, right? To the people that are thinking, oh, but if I wait on— if I wait for so long on the weekly chart, if I do nothing for like a whole year, How am I going to make money? Wouldn't I be too late? No, you wouldn't, because I've already painted the other alternative. Just because you get in early doesn't mean you're going to make money. In fact, statistically speaking, you are bound to lose money. So unless you're a fan of losing money, go ahead. This alternative here, not going to be actively, you know, potentially getting into opportunities while you're waiting for that sign of like reversal. But when it's there and you get in, guess what? You're sorted. You can just hold. Like, you can just buy in and hold for like 12 months, And magically you're gonna make like 2, 3, 4, 5x on your money. And I know that sounds oversimplified, but it is also true. Making money in crypto is simple because you have this whole 4-year cycle already kind of determined. As long as you're not doing stupid things like investing into coins that are completely obscure and you get into coins that are relatively proven, I'm talking Bitcoin, I'm talking Ethereum, I'm talking Solana, you are pretty much guaranteed to make, you know, like 3 to 5x of your money every 4 years. So it is simple, just not easy to actually wait for, you know, those opportunities to get confirmed. And it's also not simple to actually pull the trigger. Once you see those confirmations. Sometimes we know what to do, but we are unable to, you know, actually do the action. So yes, I know it sounds oversimplified, but it is also true. And the benefit of doing this is that, you know, you get to skip all of this, right? You get to avoid this entire trap of trying to predict where the bottom of the market is gonna be, because the truth is nobody knows. Neither does any of the, you know, big hedge fund traders or like the big funds. Like, they don't know. Like, when you hear people on X talk about, oh yeah, just sell and walk away, it is true. There is nothing to be done in a crypto bear market unless you're shorting. In that case, then all power to you. That's what we've been doing on this YouTube channel or with the daily calls. And by the way, subscribe and, you know, just follow along if you'd like to actually make money during a bear market because we're trading rather than investing. And also, just to address one other thing about the people that say, okay, you know, you're potentially going to be too late if you wait for that, you know, kind of reversal to kind of get confirmed. Well, then let me ask you a question, right? Or rather, let me paint a hypothetical scenario that, okay, you invested your first round of money at $75,000, right? You feel like this is a pretty major liquidity point. You feel like this is a pretty major support. So you dive into Bitcoin at around this price. Great. Currently price is down about 20% from where you got in. And for the past 4 months, price has been going down into the red, at least on your positions. Let's say that you continue to— okay, let's say that the next area that you think is going to be strong support is right here at $60,000, right? So you buy back in again. And again, it's been a month since you bought in and price is pretty much still at breakeven. Your overall position is still in the red. All right, let's say hypothetically Speaking again, the next time, okay, you think that $50K is going to be the strong support, right? And let me, let me ask you a question at this point, right? A, how much capital do you think you would still have in order to, you know, kind of buy the dip here? Because chances are you're not having any sort of strategy when it comes to dollar-cost averaging, right? Usually when people do this, it's like they put 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%. But for the average Joe getting into crypto, and especially if you're more of a beginner or intermediate, and I do not mean this in a way that is offensive to you, I'm just saying What is most likely to be statistically true. And also, this is what I did in the past, so I'm using myself here. Like, for most people, we're throwing in like 30% of the account here, and then we're gonna go all in on that second, you know, kind of level. So by the time that third level comes around, A, we're down severely, B, we're out of capital, like free capital to actually invest into, and C, our confidence is shattered at that point because we've just sat through like 6 months of price being in the red, and we're losing sleep over that because, oh my God, I put in my life savings, I'm down like, I don't know, 50% of my net worth because of these short-sighted decisions that I made in the heat of the moment. So even if you were to be able to catch the bottom, like, just think through how much psychological damage you've already taken on the way to getting there, plus how much financial damage you've already taken. Once you actually get to the bottom, it's like it doesn't matter. You're not in the position to take advantage of it anyways. Compare this to the alternative: you relax. And why force it when you could just build something else? You could read books, develop yourself, whatever. Like, I'm not going to give you life advice, but the key thing here is dollar-cost averaging is just absolutely stupid. And the better solution is to just wait for a confirmed trend reversal. Once you're in that, just to give you an example, everyone who got burned at every point during this kind of like last bear market dip, they would have zero ability to actually get in once we started to confirm that trend reversal. Now, once we got that sign though, even if you were late, right? If you were late, quote unquote late, you would still be getting in at between $25,000 to $30,000. That's what? You would have still 3x'd to potentially 4x'd your money or potentially even 5x'd your money over the course of the next 12 months or so. And this is Bitcoin. This is the largest token by market cap by far. If you just do this kind of similar theory on, let's say, something like Solana, where, okay, you're going to wait for a confirmed kind of like higher high. Let's say you use this one right here, right? Oh heck, Just say you happen to be late, right? You get in at Solana at let's say $60. Guess what? You would've still 5x'd your money. And even assuming if you're not selling the top here, you'd still at least get a solid 2, 3, 4x of whatever your money is. And I want you to just imagine, right? If you start off with, I don't know, $10,000, started off at like 2021, and you repeat this throughout 2 bull and bear cycles or whatever. And let's say you average about a 5x on your money every 4, like every 3 years. You start at $10,000, you're gonna turn that into $50,000 by the end of your first cycle. $50,000 is gonna turn Into quite close to half a million dollars, or rather $250,000, right? Again, this is just conservative estimates. It's crypto, right? A lot of people do a lot better than, you know, just 5x-ing their money. But either way, like, this is— this gives you a much better approach to, you know, actually, you know, dollar-cost averaging. Or like, I just don't dollar-cost average. Buy the dip. You're not investing into the stock market here. You're investing into what is otherwise an overglorified Ponzi scheme that moves based on a 4-year cycle. And if I could summarize the entire video with you know, one sentence, that would be it. By the way, if you'd like a way to just be able to make more consistent money from trading rather than have to rely on, you know, buying low and selling high or to rely on crypto bull and bear cycles, feel free to click the first link in the description box below. That's where I teach you my full system. It's the same system that allowed me to get a 78% win rate across 200 publicly called trades over the last year and a half. It's the same system that allowed 50% of the students that come into the program to actually get funded and become full-time traders or just make a living by trading. Overall, it's just a program that works. What can I say? And especially if you enjoy the philosophy of, you know, how I think about the markets and how I like to trade, then it's gonna be an even better fit for you. But to everyone else, if you have a question you would like answered, let's make this a bit of a series, right? Drop it down below. The more detailed you can be, the more fantastic it's gonna be. To anyone that doesn't have a question, drop a like on this video and share this to anyone of your friends that may be in crypto or maybe in finance that needs to hear this. Because for most people, dollar cost averaging is a really stupid idea.
