Dollar Cost Averaging Is Ill Founded And Overrated

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

Visual metaphor for DCA's inconsistency

Dollar cost averaging (DCA) is a strategy deliberately delaying investing money.  I will argue that DCA is an ill-founded and logically inconsistent way to manage risk.  The superior way to manage risk is a well-chosen asset allocation.

I'm going to take some time to define my terms, because people use the term DCA in different ways.  I'm not arguing against all of the different flavors of DCA, just a particular flavor.

I'll point to some existing great work on how DCA has been disappointing historically, but the heart of the post is explaining on a conceptual basis why DCA is disappointing and not a coherent approach to investing.  Proper asset allocation is the superior and coherent way to manage risk.

Terminology

S/B notation: for this post, "75s/25b" is shorthand for "75% stocks, 25% bonds".  It can be shortened to "100s" for "100% stocks" and it can be extended to "70s/20b/10c" to indicate 10% cash as well.

Asset Allocation: the proportions of stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, gold, etc, that you own.  For instance, you might have a desired asset allocation of 75s/25b, or a more aggressive 100s/0b.  Your desired asset allocation should reflect the risk-and-return profile that is appropriate for you.

Cash: in investing/savings contexts, this isn't just physical dollar bills, but also very short-term interest-bearing assets, like money in a savings account, money market fund, or even 1-month treasury bills.  These are very "safe" assets in being very unlikely to lose nominal value.

Lump Sum Investing (LSI): if you receive a sum of money, you immediately invest it in accordance with your desired asset allocation.  For instance, you inherit $100K dollars and you immediately invest it in stocks and bonds in accordance with your desired asset allocation of 75s/25b.  The core goal of LSI is to invest earlier rather than later to get more growth out of your money and to keep your asset allocation in line with your desired risk-and-return profile.

When people say "dollar cost averaging" (DCA), they usually mean one of two things:

• DCA1: If you receive a large sum of money, you don't do Lump Sum Investing (LSI) where you invest it all at once.  Instead, you initially keep the money as cash and invest it gradually over time, perhaps over a period of years.  The core goal of DCA1 is to invest across time to buy in at different price levels (thus the name) and to avoid investing all of your money at an unfortunate time (like a stock market peak). This is "DCA as opposed to LSI".
• DCA2: Continuously saving and investing (like every time you get a paycheck) over the course of years.  Just keep investing, don't try to time the market and pull out of equities before a predicted stock market crash.  The core goal of DCA2 is to invest your money as you earn it and to stick with your plan even when things looks scary.  This is "DCA as opposed to market timing".

As an example of how DCA is used in different ways.  Here's two articles from Nick Maggiulli's Of Dollars And Data site:

• How To Invest a Lump Sum, where he argues for LSI and against DCA1: "What if the market crashes right after you invest?  Wouldn’t it be better to average-in over time (i.e. dollar-cost averaging/DCA) to smooth out any unlucky timing on your part? Statistically, the answer is no."
•  Even God Couldn’t Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging, where he argues for DCA2 and against market timing: "You have 2 investment strategies to choose from ... Dollar-cost averaging ... Buy the Dip".

So, same guy, same blog, arguing against DCA1 and for DCA2, using the same term for both.  He's a smart guy that knows what he's talking about, but readers might confuse themselves if they mentally use the same label ("DCA") when thinking about both articles.

DCA1 is what I will argue against.  I approve of DCA2, which is really just the buy-and-hold (BAH) part of the Boglehead passive investing approach.  The next section will spend some more time distinguishing DCA1 vs DCA2 so that we don't think about "dollar cost averaging" in a confused manner.

ETF vs Mutual Fund (ITOT vs FZROX)

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post will try to help inform people about the "ETF vs mutual fund" decision, and we're going to go through some examples, most notably ITOT (ETF) vs FZROX (mutual fund).

Terminology notes:

• Percentage points are abbreviated "pp". Percentage points are for describing absolute amounts, not relative amounts (which we use percentages for).  A tax rate increasing from 5% to 15% is an increase of 200% (relative) and is also an increase of 10pp (absolute).
• basis points (hundredths of a percentage point) are abbreviated ‘bp’.  So 3 bp is the same as 0.03% and 0.0003

End Result For Jacob

Rule of thumb: assuming my choices are competitive, ETF (or certain Vanguard mutual funds) in taxable accounts and mutual funds in tax-advantaged accounts.

For investing in the US equity asset class, I currently purchase ITOT in my taxable account and FZROX in my Roth IRA.  I think ITOT will probably be notably better than FZROX in taxable accounts and is pretty much the same as FZROX in tax-advantaged accounts.   In tax-advantaged accounts, I go with FZROX mostly for the extra ease/convenience and making sure I don't trigger wash sales (Wiki, Fairmark, tax code).

Notes On How Modern Financial Markets Work

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post has snippets/paraphrasings of articles that get into stuff like exchanges, wholesalers, market makers, dark pools, high frequency traders, and so on.  Bullet points in quotes are article quotes.   Bullet points not in quotes are paraphrases of the article, unless I say something like "I think"/"I believe"/"I guess", which will be my own analysis.

My post The Mechanics Of How Stock Prices Change has stuff explaining basic workings of exchanges, and has an appendix about how price improvement works.

Reasonable Prioritizations Of Accounts

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post talks about reasonable prioritizations for putting your money into various accounts (401k, IRA, HSA, tax-normal brokerage, etc).  I will try to add on to what the Bogleheads wiki and /r/PersonalFinance wiki have already said on the matter.

Sections:

• A Baseline Ordering
• A Possible Ordering When Saving For A House
• Explanation Of Terms/Accounts
• Overall Reasoning Of Baseline Ordering
• How Does Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) Fit In?
• Why Traditional Over Roth?
• What About Saving For A House Or Something Else Before Retirement?
• Can I Eliminate My Emergency Fund?

A Baseline Ordering

Vanilla: exotic spice but default flavor.

To give you something notable right away, here is a reasonable ordering for putting money into various accounts if you are mostly looking to save for retirement or other long-term goals:

• Pay down high-interest debt.
• Build up an emergency fund (savings/checking account, able to cover 3-6 months of expenses).
• Max out ESPP contributions and sell shares immediately.
• Contribute to your Traditional 401k enough to get the full match from your employer.
• Max out HSA contributions.
• Max out Traditional 401k contributions.
• Max out Roth IRA contributions (and Mega Backdoor Roth contributions to your 401k if your 401k supports it).
  
• Contribute to a taxable (normal) account.

Note: this ordering also assumes that your 401k doesn't have ridiculously high fees and that you have too much income to be eligible for making tax-deductible contributions to a Traditional IRA.  Even if your income is too high to be eligible for contributing to a Roth IRA, you can make non-tax-deductible contributions to a Traditional IRA and then Roth-convert that money so that you end up with Roth IRA money.

I will explain the terms/accounts and reasoning in the sections below.

Dividends Vs Share Buybacks

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post is a work-in-progress and right now is mostly a collection of pertinent snippets/summaries of articles on the matter of dividends vs share buybacks vs other.  Some basic points:

• Many arguments in favor of dividends are fatally flawed.
• Many arguments made in favor of dividends are actually arguments in favor of dividends and share buybacks.
• For individual investors, with their tax-normal investments, share buybacks are superior to dividends due to how they're taxed differently.
• For corporate investors, dividends can be superior to share buybacks due to taxation differences.
• For tax-advantaged accounts (401k, IRA), "share buyback vs dividend" doesn't matter.
• The more a company is undervalued, the better share buybacks are, and the more a company is overvalued, the worse share buyback are, but it is foolish to think you know better than the market about the proper value of a company.
• Even if a company is undervalued, a share buyback may be inappropriate if there are good investment/growth opportunities available to the company.

Some more points:

•  A share buyback financed by debt can be thought of as a shift from equity-based financing to debt-based financing.  Interest rates are currently low and interest payments are tax-deductible (while dividends and share buyback payments are not), so this shift to debt-based financing can make a lot of sense.

Thoughts And Articles On REITs

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post will be a perpetual work in progress, where I will share article, snippets, and my own thoughts about REITs, with a focus on "how much of my portfolio should be REITs?".  Currently my answer is "about what you already get with a total stock market index fund".

Article 1: The Role of REITs in a Diversified Portfolio

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2017/08/21/the-role-of-reits-in-a-diversified-portfolio

author: Larry Swedroe

Some Ways To Think About Work, Savings, And Expenses

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post covers some new formulas that I came up with on my own that deal with a quantity (like the monetary value of your retirement portfolio) that experiences both exponential growth and regular contributions.  It is very unlikely I am the first to come up with these formulas, but it has been hard for me to find these formulas on the internet.  This post also covers some implications of these formulas, and some ways to think about the opportunity costs of savings and expenses, especially in terms of work until retirement.

Most notably, Example 5 tries to answer whether using a toll road increases or decreases the amount of time spent working/commuting until retirement.  The math/logic in the example can be used more generally to think about whether any expense is worth the extra work you must do to pay the expense.

You do not have to do any of the math yourself; you can make a copy of my Money Formula Demo Google Sheet and change some of the inputs.  To make a copy, go to the "File" menu at the top of the spreadsheet and select "Make a copy".

Misc Math

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

This post is a grab-bag of various math things that have been useful more than once in my life, and thus publishing them on my blog might help me and others in the future.

Pretty math pictures generated by Roger's Online Equation Editor.

Sections:

• Value Over Time With Growth And Contributions
• ESPP Returns
• Simple Regression Stuff
• Mental Squaring
• Chi Squared Distribution Test
• Distribution Approximations
• J-Family of Means

The Mechanics Of How Stock Prices Change

Scope And Purpose Of This Post

I've had a few people ask me, "how do stock prices change?".  They do not mean how to look at a company and try to figure out what the stock price should be; they are wondering what are the little actions going on during a price change that result in a price change.  Unfortunately, if you google "how do stock prices change", you will get a bunch of pages that answer slightly different questions, or pages that stay at the vague level of supply and demand.

This post tries to explain how price changes actually happen, mostly through examples that take place on an exchange.  The most famous exchange-traded-things are stocks, ETFs, and financial derivatives (options, futures, etc), but the underlying concepts apply to more than just things on exchanges.

A related post is Notes On How Modern Financial Markets Work, which has article snippets/paraphrasings that cover exchanges and other workings of modern financial markets.

Following Sections:

• 2 Background Info sections: will help explain a lot of concepts that I use in my examples (bids, asks, limit orders, market orders).  People familiar with such concepts might want to skip ahead to the example sections.
• Examples {1, 2a, 2b, 3}: the heart of the post, painting detailed pictures of prices changing, with some general observations as well. 
• Brief Recap: briefly summarizes of the ways that prices change, restating the lessons learned in the examples.  The section might be too abstractly worded if you haven't gone through the examples, but once you have, I hope the section will help quickly refresh you on how prices change.
• Appendix A on Price Improvement: a sidenote explaining the mechanics of "price improvement" that your brokerage may boast about after a trade.  This section may be moved in the future if I ever have a post that goes into more detail about how exchanges work.

Stock Market Index Reference

Purpose And Scope Of This Post

There's a lot of indices out there, and they will mislead you. The  S&P 500 is intuitive because it's basically the 500 biggest US companies, but the S&P 600 is unintuitively the 600 smallest of the 1500 biggest US companies.  The S&P 600 is also called the "S&P SmallCap 600", but by more popular definitions, it is the smallest 15% of  mid-cap stocks.  The Wilshire 5000 has 3485 companies in it.

This post tries to be a useful reference (mostly for myself) for what the heck a particular index is, how indices relate to each other, and to answer some common questions like, "what percent of the US stock market is represented by this index?".  You should think of it as a work in progress.

Steps to Buy an ETF at Fidelity

Purpose And Scope Of This Post

I want to help answer the question, "How, exactly, do I buy an ETF?  What buttons do I click?  What options do I choose?   What numbers do I enter, especially for things like quantity and limit price?".  There seems to be lots of written material about how to choose an ETF and the different types of buy orders, but very little written material that tries to answer the questions in quotes above.  The best I can find is stuff like the "ETF Best Trading Practices" section of this pdf from Vanguard, which still leaves things at the abstract level of "use a limit order that is likely to be executed instantly".

This post will go, click-by-click, through the process of transferring money into a Fidelity account and submitting a buy order for an ETF.  Hopefully, this click-by-click will help make people's first time easier and less scary (especially due to clear statements of which clicks have real-world consequences).  Also, this post will give the exact logic/calculations I use for coming up with the quantities and limit prices for my buy limit orders.  The logic/calculations for quantity and limit price are applicable at all brokerages, not just Fidelity.

If you are wondering what ETF to buy, see this long post or this short post.

2022-Jan update: Fidelity now has a quantity calculator, which helps with a lot of the calculations mentioned below.  Also, Fidelity now lets you buy fractional amounts of ETFs where you specify how many dollars you want to spend.  The "Explanation Of How We Calculate Desired Quantity And Limit Price" could use some updating..

Oversimplified Conversations About Portfolios

Scope Of This Post

Hubert Featherbottom

This post is not financial advice, and I refuse to take any responsibility for any financial ruin or prison time you experience.  Please do your own research and make your own conclusions.

This post is mostly a series of hypothetical conversations between fictional characters.  Fictional people ask the fictional Hubert Featherbottom about what sort of portfolio might make sense for them, and they want the simplest responses possible, disregarding all nuance, caveats, and even sanity.  By "portfolio", I mean "collection of financial assets (stocks, bonds, bank deposits, etc) someone owns in order to save up for particular needs and goals".

If you see a fictional person who asks questions similar to things you're wondering, you might find their conversation useful.  If you just want to save for the long-term in the simplest way, please look at the 401k section and Conversation 1.  If you're interested in mutual funds instead of ETFs, see Appendix B.

If you want a huge walls of text about saving/investing, see Starting Point For Saving And Investing.  If you want a click-by-click of how to buy an ETF, see Steps To Buy An ETF At Fidelity.  If you want a slightly more in-depth article about simple portfolios, see Boglehead Wiki article on Three-Fund Portfolio.

If you'd like the tables updated to include a particular broker or line of ETFs, tell me, and I'll see what I can do.

Starting Point For Saving And Investing

Scope Of This Post

This post is not financial advice, and I refuse to take any responsibility for any financial ruin you experience.  Please do your own research and make your own conclusions.

This post is a list of resources I found useful and a few thoughts not present in those resources.  This post tries not to assume any knowledge of the world of saving and investing.  A lot of friends and acquaintances have questions like "how do I even start saving for retirement or a house?".  I hope this post will help those people see what their options are, and be able to evaluate those options...after reading a lot of stuff from different places.  This is just a starting point; there is so much more to be said.

If you want to yell at me "I DON'T WANT TO KNOW STUFF, JUST TELL ME A PORTFOLIO", then read the oversimplified conversations post, possibly followed up by the steps to buy an ETF post.

If you have questions like, "should I prioritize my 401k or my IRA?", then read Reasonable Prioritizations Of Accounts.

Also, be careful; there's a lot of very bad investment advice out there (ex: "These are the must-buy Chinese biotech stocks of 2018!").  I hope to provide a safe starting point for people to educate themselves, but you should read my words with a critical eye as well.

Bonds and the Upsides/Downsides of Interest Rate Changes

Scope Of This Post

One discussion I keep having with people centers around the hypothetical scenario of a person buying bonds and then interest rates change.  In particular, people seem to be worried about buying bonds and then interest rates increase (especially an unexpected increase since expected increases are supposedly already priced into bonds).

My assertion is that although an investor would have benefited from delaying purchase of bonds until after the (unexpected) increase in interest rates, an investor holding pre-existing bonds is not necessarily worse off when interest rates increase.

For most of my post, I will be talking about interest rates changing but inflation staying constant.  Also, the characters in my stories like to buy 3-year bonds and only 3-year bonds.  So, when my story involves "interest rates changing from 5% to 6.9%", I'm specifically talking about the interest rates for 3-year bonds only.  I know the world has more than 3-year bonds, but I'm keeping my stories short and simple.

I will also ignore callable bonds, TIPS, taxes, convexity, and default risk; I believe those concepts do not change the conclusions about the benefits/harms of interest rate changes on bond holders.

I welcome comments and especially corrections to the assertions I make in this post.