Anyone DCAing into a downtrend… Please stop… Go spend sometime learning the most basic principle of the market; market structure.
You are right that nobody should DCA into a downtrend of a particular stock (aka trying to catch a falling knife), unless one knows the business behind the stock very well and one is convinced that the business has a great future (e.g. Amazon in 2008). One should know the concept of value trap before buying into any stock that seems cheap.
DCA-ing into a broad market index is a completely different story. There are very small chances that the S&P 500 won't bounce back in the next 5-10 years or sooner.
I learned my lesson in 2020: I kept thinking that the S&P500 will go lower, it will go lower, then it just bounced upwards and it was all over. I don't know what the Feds will do, what the politicians will do, what wars will come or end, and how the market will react (it's been idiosyncratic before - it's hard to predict in real-time, it just looks easy in hindsight).
I'm investing for 20+ years, so I honestly don't care if the market drops another 30-50% till it bottoms, as long as I am DCA-ing into that. If I get to buy the index at bottom + 20% on average, I'd be very satisfied.
And I'm only DCA-ing about 25% of my cash for now. There's going to be another 25% that will be spent if the market drops another 25-30%. Another 25% that may be spent on great businesses if at bargain prices (e.g. COST or AMZN, or SNOW). And so on. I spread my bets exactly because I am an amateur who knows nothing (while still knowing much more than the average physician).
As Nick Maggiulli says: (if you still have 20-30 years till you need that money) Just Keep Buying. Btw, I strongly recommend that book.
Ray Dalio may have become a billionaire from knowing how to time the market, but even he cannot predict the bottom. And I'm no Ray Dalio (plus all the geniuses in his hedge fund).
You seem to be suggesting that a strong dollar means that we are far from the market bottom. To me, it means that everybody else is even more f-cked up than we are, which is usual (when America sneezes the world gets a pneumonia). Yes, it may affect our exports and profits, but, on the other hand, 30% of the S&P 500 profits come from abroad anyway.
Anyway, there's nobody here who knows much, because otherwise they would have fatFIRE'd and be enjoying the good life, instead of posting on this forum. Even then, it's not such a big deal to make money during a bull market, like the one that has just ended. One may have just gotten very lucky, like the one who wins the lottery. It doesn't mean that playing the lottery is a good idea.
TBH, I am most concerned not about missing the bottom, but about the fact that high inflation will continue, for the simple reason that this country has such a huge debt that it will need inflation to service it (on top of all the money already going to populist causes). In which case, cash will be trash again.
