Dollar Cost Average: a Legitimate Strategy on eToro?

As the world of trading continues to evolve, investors are bombarded with numerous strategies focused on short-term gains. While there’s nothing wrong with seizing opportunities, it’s essential to understand the value of long-term wealth creation strategies, especially when investing on eToro. This article delves into the dollar-cost averaging strategy, a popular method to neutralize market volatility‘s effects on your portfolio.💡

Understanding the Dollar-Cost Averaging Strategy

🧩 What is Dollar-Cost Averaging?

Dollar-cost averaging is a time-tested strategy designed to reduce the impact of market volatility on an investment portfolio. With this approach, you invest a fixed amount of money into various assets at regular intervals, regardless of the asset’s strategy contrasts with an initial lump sum investment, which involves putting all your money into an asset at once.

⚙️ How Does It Work?

The goal of dollar-cost averaging is to maintain a constant investment amount, regardless of the asset’s price fluctuations. When the asset’s price increases, you purchase fewer shares, while you acquire more shares when the price drops. This approach results in a lower average cost per share over time, mitigating the risk of potential losses.

Let’s say you plan on purchasing a certain amount of shares in January, investing a total of $1200. The two options that you face are investing the entire amount initially (also known as a lump-sum investment) or spreading the purchases over a year using the dollar-cost averaging strategy, sp lets say with payments made every month. You then choose to spend $100 for example every month according to the strategy as shown in the table below.

As we can see from the table, if you have made your purchases periodically instead, you would have purchased 121.27 shares over the time period with an average cost of $9.89. This is 0.11 dollar cents less than the initial lump sum spending strategy. (Do bear in mind that these is an arbitrary example of how the strategy is meant to work out and does not necessarily represent a real world example; markets are extremely volatile and there is always a chance of capital losses) If you have had employed your entire investment amount to purchase all of the shares in January, you would own 120 shares after 12 month at a price of $10 per share.

Implementing Dollar-Cost Averaging on eToro

📈 Choosing Your Assets

eToro offers a wide variety of assets, enabling you to find the right fit for your investment strategy. For instance, let’s use Apple stock as an example. Instead of investing your entire amount at the beginning of the period, you could employ dollar-cost averaging by investing a fixed sum every month.

🗓️ Setting Up Your Investment Schedule

Suppose you decide to invest in Apple shares monthly for a year. By purchasing shares at the beginning of each month, you’ll automatically buy more shares when the price is low and fewer when it’s high. This approach lowers your average cost per share, as the strategy’s name suggests.

Let’s say the strategy was being set up at the beggining of December 2019 and maintained until December of the next year, with a chosen time interval of one month (could be a different one of course). Then purchases of this Apple share would have been made at the beggining of every month for a certain amount of money suitable for your available capital. As you can see from the price chart the price of this stock is very volatile, so some months the investment amount would allow you to buy more shares (like April for example) and some months fewer (like September, where the price was at its highest). And that demonstrates the simplicity of the strategy: by default you would have purchased fewer shares when the price was high and more shares when it was low, so on average the cost declines as the strategy’s name suggests.

The platform makes it possible for traders with limited available capital too as there is always an option to buy fractions of shares, as shown below.

💹 Fractional Shares and Flexibility

eToro’s platform also allows you to buy fractional shares, making this strategy accessible to investors with limited capital. This feature ensures that you can still participate in dollar-cost averaging even if you can’t afford to buy full shares.

💲 Dollar-cost averaging out

The opposite pocess can be applied to the process of selling as well as buying, reducing the impact of market volatilities on short positions taken over a period of time by averaging out the selling price. The image below shows the long (buy) positions in green and short (selling positions) in red. This strategy allows to both average in and out according to the same strategy and the average of potential profits can be received in this way.

Pros and Cons of Dollar-Cost Averaging

👍 Advantages

• Reduces the impact of psychological trading and emotional decision-making.
• Does not require a large initial capital investment.
• Helps maintain liquidity and minimizes risk exposure.
• Requires less time and effort in market analysis.
• Focuses on long-term wealth creation.

👎 Disadvantages

• May result in higher fees and transaction costs due to periodic investments.
• Lacks flexibility to adjust to changing economic conditions or rebalancing.
• Does not typically yield high returns due to its passive nature.

Conclusion: A Balanced Strategy for Long-Term Investors

Dollar-cost averaging offers a proven, long-term investment strategy for eToro investors seeking to minimize risks and reduce the impact of short-term market volatility. By investing in assets at predetermined intervals with a fixed amount of capital, you can achieve a lower average cost per share. However, it’s crucial to consider the strategy’s advantages and disadvantages in the context of your investment goals. With a thorough understanding of dollar-cost averaging, you can confidently implement this approach on eToro and work toward long-term wealth creation.🌟

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Author & Expert Trader - Financial Analyst :

My name is Bart Bregman and I am a full-time professional trader with nine years of experience. I specialize in shorter-term trading using technical analysis, and I have extensive experience with Stocks, CFDs, Options, and Crypto trading. I believe that there is no such thing as a bad trade. I'm currently traveling the world as a digital nomad trader. You can follow my journey on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/bart_bregman/