Thanks for the correction, I didn’t know DCA was meant for lump sums. That makes it really dumb, I think, as it assumes down market. This whole time I thought DCA was a reflection of constantly investing chunks over time as money comes available, a good idea I think.

The Wikipedia article [0] has quite a few links to studies showing this is worse than lump sum.

I’m trying to think of any scenarios where this would be smart, but they all seem to assume market knowledge and just adjusting a lump sum payment. Even if you “knew” it was a down market and didn’t know when it would pick up it is bad because you would miss the biggest upswings at the bottom of the bear.

I think this is just one of those platitudes that retail advisors give people because it sounds good, but actually isn’t.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging