Smart DCA: a schedule that buys more when it's cheaper

Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is the plainest plan there is: buy the same amount on the same day every week, whatever the price. Over time you buy more units when the price is low and fewer when it is high, simply because the amount is fixed. Smart DCA keeps the schedule and adds one rule: the amount itself grows when the price is below its recent average and shrinks, or stops, when it is above.

How each buy is sized

Every scheduled buy compares the price with its 30-day simple moving average on daily bars, and sets a multiplier on your base amount:

multiplier = 1 - 4 × (price - average) / average, kept between 0 and 3.

• At the average, the bot buys 1 times the base.
• 10% below, it buys 1.4 times.
• 25% below, 2 times.
• 50% or more below, 3 times, the ceiling.
• 10% above, 0.6 times.
• 25% or more above, nothing. That week is skipped.

A skipped week is used up, not saved for later. The next buy waits for the next scheduled day; it does not jump in on the first dip after a high, which would be a different strategy.

The schedule

A new Smart DCA on A9 runs on the day bar and buys once a week, on Wednesday. On a day bar the order is placed at 11:00 New York time, on every exchange, plus a fixed offset of up to five minutes per bot so that many plans do not hit the market in the same second. You can name other weekdays, or clear the days and buy every few bars instead.

On a tokenized stock, a scheduled buy is not placed while the US market is closed for a holiday. The buy carries over to the next session day rather than being lost, and it happens once, not twice, when it does.

Taking profit, and starting again

When the price rises 8% above the average cost of everything the plan has bought, the bot sells the whole position and a new cycle begins. On the day bar this is checked once a day, at the order time. The schedule then keeps running into the new cycle.

The default is tuned for turning over: a monthly gauge and a quick 8% target buy the dip against the recent average and sell the first reasonable bounce. A second profile suits someone who wants to hold what they buy: a 200-day average and a 25% target, or 0 to never sell. In A9's own tests over six large coins from 2021, the 200-day profile bought at an average cost about 12% lower than plain DCA on the same schedule, and the 30-day default closed more calendar years in profit. Past tests, not a forecast; the point is that the two settings answer different questions.

What it commits

A cycle may buy at most 52 times before it has to wait for its target. The worst case is every one of those buys at the 3 times ceiling: 156 times the base amount. With a base of 10 USDT, that is up to 1,560 USDT. The launch panel shows the number of buys, the smallest and largest single buy, and this worst case before you start.

Because the worst case arrives only after many months of buys at the top of the range, A9 lets you accept a plan total above the live ceiling deliberately, rather than refusing it outright as it would for a martingale ladder that can fill in a few days.

What it is not

• It is not protection against a falling market. It is built to keep buying while the price is below its average, and in a long decline that means buying more, for months. In A9's tests no setting turned a year like 2022 positive; what the plan offers is a lower average cost than plain DCA, not immunity from losses.
• It is long only, on spot. There is no short side to a savings plan.
• A Fear & Greed floor, if one is set on the bot, blocks scheduled buys while the index is below it. For this strategy that is usually the moment it was designed to buy, so think before using one.
• Tokenized stocks have only a few months of daily history. Their backtests and shortlist rankings cover those weeks since listing and nothing earlier.

Reading a Smart DCA backtest

The backtest starts the plan before the window you choose, so the window opens already holding what the plan would have bought by then, as a live bot would. Read the result against buy and hold over the same window, and remember what the plan claims: a lower average cost than buying the same amount every week. In a falling year it can do exactly that and still show a loss.