A year of buying the dip: what $50 a week into Bitcoin actually returned

Every DCA article you've ever read was written during a bull market, and it shows. So here's the experiment nobody publishes: we replayed $50 every week into Bitcoin across the past 365 days of our own recorded AUD prices — a year in which Bitcoin fell from around A$183,000 to under A$92,000. No cherry-picked start date, no fees ignored in the fine print (we'll get to fees), just the arithmetic of a strategy meeting a bear market.

The headline numbers

Fifty-three weekly buys, A$2,650 invested. Final value: A$2,017 — a loss of 23.9%. The average purchase price worked out to A$120,683 per Bitcoin against a closing price of A$91,847. That's the honest result: dollar-cost averaging through one of the roughest years in recent memory still lost money, because no schedule can rescue an asset that ends the period 50% below where it started.

Now the comparison that matters

The same A$2,650 invested as a lump sum on day one finished at A$1,328 — a loss of 49.9%, fully tracking Bitcoin's fall from that A$183,000 starting price. The identical dollars, the identical asset, the identical year: the schedule lost 24% while the lump sum lost 50%. Ethereum tells the same story with different digits — weekly DCA lost 27.1% while a day-one lump sum lost 53.7%. DCA didn't make money; it halved the damage, because most of its purchases happened at prices far below the starting peak. That is precisely what the strategy is for — and precisely all it can do.

What this year would have taught a DCA investor

Three things the maths makes vivid. First, DCA's advantage is largest exactly when investing feels worst — the buys near July's low of A$85,000 are the ones propping up the portfolio. Second, the mirror image is also true: in a rising market DCA lags a lump sum, because later buys happen at higher prices. Whether DCA "wins" is decided entirely by a price path nobody can predict — its real superpower is behavioural, not mathematical. It removes the timing decision, the single place where retail investors most reliably hurt themselves. Third: fees compound quietly on 53 orders. At the ~1% many platforms charge on small instant buys, this year's experiment loses another ~A$27 — our fee comparison shows which platforms make recurring buys cheap, and it's a bigger differentiator than most people rate it.

Run your own version

Our DCA calculator replays any schedule — amount, frequency, coin, period — against the same daily AUD records this study used, with the lump-sum comparison shown honestly every time. And a tax note before you restructure anything: every DCA purchase starts its own 12-month clock for the CGT discount and creates its own cost-base parcel, which is why crypto tax software earns its keep for schedule buyers.

Backtest uses daily AUD closing prices from our market database (data by CoinGecko), 31 July 2025 – 30 July 2026, excluding fees. Past performance is no indicator of future results. General information, not financial advice.