One Year of Dollar-Cost Averaging into ETFs (What Matters More Than Returns)
Since last year, I’ve been buying a little bit of S&P 500 and Nasdaq ETFs every month. It’s not a large amount—about 500,000 won per month.
What I’ve realized over the past year is that automatic transfers matter far more than returns. When the market is shaky, I just can’t bring myself to buy manually. With automatic transfers, I don’t have to think about it.
My unrealized gain/loss is still slightly positive. I’m not trying to make a big profit right away; I’m looking at it on a 10-year horizon.
3 answers
Automatic transfers, agreed. If you buy manually, you end up only buying when it's going up lol.
I've been doing something similar for three years now, and I had the same thought in year one. But once you get past two years, the issue isn't the automatic transfer—it's whether you still have cash left. If you're committing a fixed 500,000 won per month, the monthly outflow can feel burdensome when you need a lump sum, so I'd recommend setting aside about six months' worth of emergency funds separately and investing the rest. Also, buying both S&P 500 and Nasdaq means a lot of overlapping holdings, so it's hard to call that diversification. After I realized that, I adjusted my allocations.