Bitcoin DCA vs Lump Sum Calculator

All three spend exactly the same money. Starting at the October 2025 peak at $200 a month, that is $2,000 across ten months. Dollar-cost averaging buys $200 of Bitcoin at each monthly price, ending with an average cost near $70,910 a coin and about $1,833 today, down 8%. Lump sum puts the whole $2,000 in at the starting price, and at the peak's $126,198 that is about $1,030, down 49%. Waiting in cash holds the money and buys today, showing $2,000 and 0%.

That third bar is a definition, not a result. Cash converted at today's price is worth precisely what you put in, so it reads 0% no matter which settings you choose. It is a reference line — and it is the line that beats dollar-cost averaging whenever the window ends below where it started.

This is a ten-month stretch that begins at a cycle top and ends 49% below it. Dollar-cost averaging wins here because it was built to win here: it keeps buying as the price falls, dragging the average cost down. The mechanism is real.

It is not a general result. Pick a window that ends higher than it starts and the lump sum wins, for the plain reason that more money spent more time invested. Most historical windows, in most assets, look like that. The honest claim is narrow — in a long, choppy drawdown, dollar-cost averaging loses less. Not that it is better.

You can watch the effect shrink inside the tool. Start at the peak and dollar-cost averaging beats the lump sum by about 41 percentage points. Start near the February low and that gap collapses to roughly 7 points. Same strategy, far less of the fall left to average into.

The prices are rounded monthly reference points running from a $126,198 peak to $64,975 in July 2026, not daily closes, so read the outputs as shape rather than precision. Fees and taxes are ignored entirely.

So is the fact that cash actually earns interest. At 4% APY, the waited-in-cash bar would land closer to $2,036 than $2,000 — a small edge, but it means waiting is very slightly better than the flat 0% implies, and the tool understates it. One historical stretch of one unusually volatile asset is intuition, not evidence.