Roaming Returns
Most nomads just relocate their hustle—freelancing, content grinding, or trading time for money on the road.
We’re Tim & Carmela, the Income Investing Nomads.
On Roaming Returns, we break down how to build hybrid income streams—dividends, value investing, strategic flips, and tax-smart strategies—that decouple your time from your income.
So you can fund your freedom, travel full time (even in a van), and stop deferring your life.
No hype. No one-size-fits-all dogma. Just real numbers, tested strategies, and honest conversations about how to make work optional.
New episodes drop every Thursday.
Roaming Returns
129 - Our Twist on Dollar-Cost Averaging to Buy More, Risk Less, and Earn Faster
Most investors treat Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) like gospel — same amount, same time, no questions asked.
We don’t.
This week, we dive into our “Dynamic DCA” strategy — a smarter, more flexible way to lower your cost basis and grow income faster. By knowing our dividend stocks so well, we can turn off DRIP when they’re overvalued and pile in when they dip into buy zones. It’s still incremental, still disciplined — but driven by valuation and timing, not automation.
💡 In this episode we cover:
- ⚙️ How “Dynamic DCA” works (and why it beats traditional DCA for dividend investors)
- 💸 The tradeoff between lump-sum investing vs. incremental investing
- 🕒 Why DCA only smooths volatility if your horizon is 10+ years
- 📊 10 real examples from our portfolio — THTA, UPS, SPMC, UAN, TGT, LYB, CMG, OZK, ADM & ES — and how Dynamic DCA changed our cost basis
- 🧠 How we combine value investing, macro awareness, and micro strategies to churn capital and grow monthly income faster
- 💥 Why “waiting for the perfect price” is a myth — and why cash reserves (like THTA) are your secret weapon
If your goal is to reach monthly income freedom faster, this episode will change how you think about DCA forever.
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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.
Episode music was created using Loudly.
Welcome to roaming returns a podcast about generating a passive income with dividend stocks so you can secure your finances and liberate your life.
Most investors buy the same stock every payday, no matter the price. We don’t. We buy when it makes sense — and skip when it doesn’t. It’s like dollar-cost averaging, but smarter.
This week, we’re breaking down our dynamic twist on the traditional DCA strategy — turning DRIP off when prices are high and loading up when they hit value ranges. We’ll show you how it actually plays out across 10 real positions in our portfolio, and how this hybrid, micro-strategy helps us boost our monthly dividends faster.
What the hell are you doing, Timothy? Dancing, I'm dancing. Claptrap. Claptrap.
Remember Claptrap? Yeah. Stairs. Oh no, stairs.
Okay. What's up, y'all? So we are in the garage. We're in the garage, moving stuff from storage into piles so that we can determine what we're taking with us and what we're getting rid of, so good times.
Yep. Okay, so this week's episode I think is going to be super interesting. My voice is a little screwed up because I've been, I don't know, sinus infected for like a week or something? Upper respiratory? Yeah.
I don't know. We've been sick. Not as bad as me.
I've been really bad. So the last couple weeks we've been all over the map, right? Good times. All over the map.
And we've been all over the maps. But this week what we're going to do is we're actually going to show you examples in our portfolios of dollar cost averaging so you can see the benefits of it, like how I use it to actually lower my cost basis. It's not by definition the dollar cost averaging, but to me it is.
So first, what is dollar cost averaging, obviously? Please share with everyone. Why would it be helpful? Well, dollar cost averaging is a strategy which involves buying shares over time instead of making a single lump sum investment. So say like you want to invest in one of the weekly pairs, we'll go do PLTW.
Rather than putting $5,000 into PLTW right off the bat, you just put in like half, put in $2,500. And then like every week or two weeks or month, you would put $500 in, no matter where the price was at. Until you reach that original total, right? Yeah, until you reach your $5,000.
This can help actually reduce the impact of market volatility because you are not really concerned with what the market's doing. You're just making a concerted effort to put money into your investments every week or every two weeks or every month, whatever you decide. Like there's people that do it every week.
There's people that do it twice a month. There's people that do it once a month. There's people that do it once every six months.
And then there's even people that will do it every year in December. And that's why December sometimes is crazy because they're selling the losers for tax harvesting. And then they're putting in money into the ones that they want to keep, no matter what the price is.
But that's reallocation, not necessarily dollar cost averaging. So normally, the strategy involves putting whatever amount of money that you want to, if it's $100, $500, $1,000, whichever, $50, whatever you want it to be, into positions in your portfolio each month or week, or like I said, every two times a month, whatever. But you can tweak it.
And I actually have tweaked it to fit better with what I want to do in our portfolio. Sorry, I'm sitting on a bucket. And make it more aligned with your investing strategy.
You should find that over time, basically, the more you watch investments in your portfolio, you notice patterns about each stock you own, where the resistance points are. One of the prime examples in our portfolio is I noticed a long time ago that Trin, T-R-I-N is Trinity Capital, had a floor of around 1250 to 1280. And that was since June 2023.
And I also noticed that TRIN also had a ceiling between like 1550 and 1575. So having that useful pattern and data available made it easier to pick up shares when it was low and to take profits when it was high. And you'll notice, like we've talked about through the years.
And that would be called band trading, right? Yeah. But you can use it with your dollar cost average. Say I wanted to put $5,000 into Trinity, and I noticed the pattern.
Anytime it dropped below $13, I could dollar cost average in, no matter when that is, to lower my cost basis. And I never have to worry about overpaying. My bitch with dollar cost averaging is that people do it in bull markets and bear markets.
So you're basically... Take a really popular like NVIDIA. Every week or two weeks, they'll just put $100 into NVIDIA. Well, NVIDIA has literally gone pretty much straight up.
So when you put $100 into it now, you're not getting the same quantity that you would have got, say, six months ago when NVIDIA was at like $130. It's now at like $200. So my bitch with dollar cost averaging is that people don't take the time to actually realize the pattern and say, well, I don't want to put money into this investment when it's above this.
Well, dollar cost averaging, from what Tim is talking about, is if your time horizon is too short. So like they're not... But if you do even investing incrementally during bull runs, as long as you're going to be in it for at least 10 years, it kind of doesn't matter. But if it's shorter term from that, like you do benefit from adding in Tim's twist, where if you can find stuff that's in bands and then just trade in the bands.
So like the two biggest benefits of it are, one, it averages out the cost. And the second one is it removes emotions. If you basically say, I'm going to put $100 in every two weeks, your emotions out of it.
You're literally just putting $100 in every two weeks. Averages out the cost because over time, the strategy can, if you use the one that all the experts use, you can lower your average cost per share because you are buying more shares when prices are down and fewer when they are up. Well, I think the point of it more so, like Tony Robbins' book, Money Master the Game, had a really, really good example.
I kind of wish I would have had that up to reference during this. But if you take that longer time horizon and you do the dollar cost averaging versus somebody who's waiting for the ideal time in the market versus somebody else who basically got in at the worst time of the market, they did a comparison of a lump sum versus a dollar cost averaging and dollar cost averaging actually panned out to the benefit of the person doing it in the long haul because you don't make money if you're not in the market. And that whole point of waiting to get in, you leave opportunity on the table.
Well, they did like... So again, you could argue this from so many different angles. Vanguard did a study, I think it was in 2023, about dollar cost averaging. And one of the biggest pitches that they had was that if you do, if you have a large sum of money to invest, but you're actually using the dollar cost average methodology, a portion of your cash sits on the sidelines.
Sits on the sidelines. Earns a low return while waiting to be invested. So a lot of people... They did find that.
If you do not have the money as a lump sum, dollar cost averaging really is your only option anyway. So you kind of innately do that because you don't have a lump sum. But when you have a lump sum, yes, if your money is not out there doing something, it is, again, like we always talk about, not making money.
But what they did find in the same survey, I'll try to find it so we can link it in the show notes, was that between 1976 and 2022, that if you just lump sum invested, you outperform dollar cost averaging in two-thirds of the historical periods. Oh, so that's interesting. Again, you could do that based on time frame.
So again... I mean, it's between 76 and 22. So what is that? 46 years? Yeah. But they could have done it right after a massive pour up.
Do you know what I'm saying? You can, whatever with data, depending on then how much it's in. That's especially true during bull markets, like which we're currently in, where delaying your investment means buying shares at increasingly higher prices that will reduce your potential gain. So I mean, it does help.
It is helpful to be cognizant of that. Hey, the market's in a sustained bull market. Maybe I should not put it into that investment, put it into something else that's valued better or... Yeah.
But if you're doing like index funds or something, like it's a total market index. So it's like, it's going to be high. But the problem with the bull market, and Tim and I have been discussing this, I think on the podcast throughout the last year or whatever.
But the market trend has been different than historical. So like, it seems like there's either more variables or more chaos being injected, or there's just like a new harmonic balance thing that's like coming up to a new pattern. But like, if you didn't get in saying, hey, I'm in a bull market, I actually took my TSP out.
Do you remember I took my TSP out and put it in like the super secure, like not movement thing, knowing a bear market crash is going to happen. And we actually had two of the best freaking years after that point. And I was just like, WTF.
Like, you never really know what's actually going to happen. Even if you know a bear is coming at some point, it could happen this year, it could happen next year, it could happen seven years from now. Who the hell actually knows? That's why I like what I've actually implemented in ours, basically just looking at stocks enough to know the bands.
So like, it doesn't matter if it's a bull or a bear, I just know that like certain stocks move in certain bands. I like that too, for that reason. Like the more that you're in your portfolio, the more that you're researching, the more that you're actually looking at this type of stuff, you'll start to see like little patterns that you can actually use to your advantage like that.
Dollar cost average does not protect against the risk of loss in a declining market. And that's like one of the huge things is basically what you're doing is if your dollar cost average, and say Icon, when Icon went from like $80 down to $8, say you dollar cost averaged while it kept going down, like, oh, it's at a good price. You simply are just averaging down your cost basis on an asset that's just bleeding money.
And you'd be in a better position than we're in currently, because we held the whole way down, but. You would be, but like it doesn't. It doesn't protect you from losing because you're still losing at every buy point, so that average comes down.
So what they say, they said dollar cost averaging removes the emotion of selling during the panic because you're not going to sell, you're going to just buy more shares, but it also removes the logic of getting out of a bad position because you're stuck to the dollar cost averaging strategy. So it's something to, it's a quiver to use, but it's not something that I would hang my hat on, like I wouldn't complete my whole investment strategy on dollar cost averaging, but it's something that you can use to benefit you. And if you've been paying attention to the way that we invest, we basically take a little bit of here, this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and we make it into a hodgepodge.
Like you apply different things when it makes sense, and you basically make it an outlier or a not applicable when other things are in play. That's the problem with investing. There's always a circumstance in a situation where it can be this, this, and that.
And I do understand people's want for the simplicity factor. So I get it. It is pretty simple though.
Literally just every two weeks, I'm going to put $100 into X. It's very simple. Yeah, I can see the appeal, definitely. Okay, scroll down.
We're done with that. That is, in a nutshell, dollar cost averaging. If you have any questions or comments, you can obviously ask and I'll get back to you.
I try to do that as frequently as I can. Now we're going to go through 10 examples and the portfolios where we actually dollar cost average. So you can see what it does if you implement it correctly or incorrectly, depending on the investment.
The first one was THTA. I've been adding to THTA because if you're familiar with us, THTA is our cash position. So that's where I stick my cash until I'm waiting to liquidate shares to put in something else.
We originally bought 74 shares for $1,404 on December 20th of 2024, which was a cost basis of $18.97 per share. Then on the third, I had some extra money left over. So we bought seven more shares for $134.
So now we have 81 shares and a total amount invested of $1,538. The cost basis actually went up from $18.97 to $18.99. Per share. And then in February, I had more money laying around.
So on 2-4, we bought six more shares for $115, meaning now we have 87 shares of THTA and a total investment amount of $1,653. And the cost basis again went up. It's now at $19 per share.
Then on March 10th, we bought seven more shares for $134, meaning that we now had 94 shares for a total investment amount of $1,787 and a cost basis of $19.01. Then the tariff tantrum happened. All hell broke loose when the overlord said, we're doing tariffs on everyone. So on April 4th, we bought 30 more shares for $480, meaning we now had 124 shares of THTA with a total investment amount of $2,267 and a cost basis of $18.29. See how we went from $19.01 down to $18.29, which is $480 invested.
It's crazy. And then for a while, I was dabbling with the cash, putting it into other stuff. So then on 10-21, we bought 71 more shares of THTA for $1,068, meaning we now have 195 total shares of THTA for a total investment amount of $3,335 and a cost basis of $17.10. So just putting money into it, we dropped our cost basis from around $19 down to $17.
That's how that works. The beauty of dollar-cost averaging. And THTA pays a dividend of $0.15 a month.
For the most part, it's a variable dividend, but it should generally have been about $0.15 a month. So we did actually collect dividends of, what is that, January, February, March, April. So for 10 months, we collected $1.50 in dividends, which then would have brought our cost basis from $17.10 down to $15.60. Currently, THTA trades at around $15.10, $0.07, something like that.
What exactly? Because that means you're still down. So we're still down in it, but we're not. 15 times how many shares? So THTA's current price is $15.10 around there.
So we're $2 per share down. So we're $390 still down in THTA. Now, the dividends have made up a little bit of that, but because they've been sporadic, we had $74, then we had $81.
But the point of that was what we said earlier in the podcast, that just dollar-cost averaging does not save you from losses of value. So we're actually down, even though our dollar-cost average came down. Right.
That was the point. And the next one, we're down in too. Way to spoil it for everyone.
The next one is UPS. We bought 14 shares of UPS for $1,862 on November 11th, 2024. Oh, Veterans Day, 11-11.
Which equates to a cost basis of $132.99 per share. And then on 10-21-25, we bought 10 more shares for $875. We now have 24 shares of UPS, total amount invested of $27.37. And we have a cost basis of $114.04. UPS is currently at $96, so we're still down $18 per share.
So 18 times 24 is... 432. So we're still down $432 in UPS. But had we just stuck where we were, we would have been down with 33 plus four, 37 times 14.
518. 518. So we actually did make up some ground on UPS by actually dollar-cost averaging because we actually were able to get into the lower price and to make our cost basis more attainable.
Because I do think UPS has room in it to get up to 114. Then we might get out of it. I don't know.
But that gets... So that's two. Two of them we've lost money in. Two of the 10.
Two of the 10. But that's what I do. It's mainly the losers.
The next one is SPMC. We bought 165 shares for $3,005 on July 9th, 2025, which was a cost basis of $18.21 per share. And then on 10-20, 2025, we bought 32 more shares for $507.
So we now have 197 shares and a total amount invested of $3,512 with a cost basis of $17.83. SPMC is... I think it's under 16. So we're like $1.83 down on 197 shares. So it's about $400 down on SPMC as well.
But had we stuck where we were, we would be a lot... Further down. Further down. Yeah.
I mean, you don't have to do that for each one. They got the point from the first two. But the other thing I do want to say now is I'm assuming those are from DRIP reinvesting? No.
Those are like we had money... But you collected the dividend in cash and then you waited until it was down? Yes. Is that the gist? I used cash for all these. I didn't sell anything to put money into me.
It was just cash from all the other investments. So you could in theory just use the drip reinvesting as a form of dollar cost averaging. I'm pretty sure we've talked about that before, probably early on in the podcast startup, but that's another concept. But Tim does it a lot more strategically where he like takes it in cash, he waits again and then does that band trade thing where he knows the pattern and then he'll get in when they're down to bring it down to Helen versus.
The next one we're up. Technical, technical dollar cost averaging where it's like a weekly recurring thing. Next one, we're up a lot.
Hell, we're up a lot in this one. It's UAN. We bought 29 shares for $2,507 on July 12th, 2023, which was a cost basis of $86.43. And then on August 29th, 2023, we bought 14 more shares for $1,079, which means we have 43 shares and a total amount invested of $3,586 with a cost basis of $83.39. You see, we dropped the cost basis a lot in this one.
UAN is currently at $100 a share, so we have 17 times 43. We're up a shit ton in UAN. It's like one of our better holdings.
If you're not familiar, UAN is the fertilizer one. We're up almost $750 on that one. $731, almost $750.
That's a heck of a rounding. So this one is the fertilizer one. It's pretty cyclical.
So this one's actually pretty easy to identify the pattern for this one because during the winter months, it's low. And then during the spring months, it's high. And then during the hot months, it's low.
And then during the fall, it's high. So there's two times a year where you can get into UAN for cheaper than you could. If you just wait.
This one's very cyclical. Again, winter, summer, it's normally lower than it is in spring and fall. Next one's a newer one.
It's Target. This is the one that I said to people that ask us at Target, no matter what you think of their policies or politics, it doesn't really matter. They make entirely too much money to not buy when they're at a really cheap price.
So we bought nine shares for $938 on August 11th, 2025, which came out to a cost basis of $104.19. And then a month later on 9-12, 2025, we bought eight more shares for $731. That means we had 17 shares for a total amount invested of $1,669 and a cost basis of $98.16. And then on October 15th, 2025, we bought 10 more shares for $896. And we now currently hold 27 shares with a total amount invested of $2,564 and a cost basis of $94.97. So we dropped that cost basis almost $10, just picking it up when it was on sale.
And this one is currently around $100. So we're actually technically up in Target somehow. I don't know how.
But had we not did what I considered dollar cost averaging, we would have been down because it's at $100. We would have been down. And we just went with our initial nine shares.
We would be down for like $5 around there, but instead we're up like $5. So again, knowing the value of a stock and if you don't know the formulas, there are things on Google where you can just say a valuation of such and such stock, and they'll generally give you a good idea. Or if you have access to Schwab, that number that I showed you before on the right column, there's something called LSEG.
They just make valuations and it says that its target's worth 115. If you go into Yahoo Finance and then you click on, you type the ticker in, then you click on the analysis, it'll actually pull up a page where you can see what all the experts covering the stock think that the price target should be. So there's ways to estimate the valuation.
I don't know exactly what target's worth. I'm assuming it's like 110, 115. I don't know if anybody knows exactly what it's worth because it's always in flux.
Because it's perceived value. Another one we did in the retirement account was LYB. It's the chemical one.
We bought 45 shares for $2,447 on June 3rd of this year, 2025, which came out to a cost basis of $54.38. And then on October 15th, we bought 10 more shares for $474. So now we have 55 shares and a total amount invested of 2,921 with a cost basis of 53.12. That's a little tiny purchase. That's maybe 20% of what we put into before.
I think it's a little under 20%, but it was only a $474 purchase and it dropped it from 54.38 to 53.12. That's $1.26. So that's good. Next one, I fucked up on. This will be on the Whipsy Daisies this year.
Oh no. What happened? Chipotle, they did their earnings recently and they said people aren't coming to our store anymore. So their stock's now like $30 a share.
Oh no. We thought they were going to be a good go because of the stock split, right? Yeah. And we never got out? No, I'm going to be in this one.
I'm just going to hold this retirement account. Chipotle CMG, we bought 22 shares for $1,026 on July 25th, 2025. Cost basis of $46.62. Then on September 12th, we bought 12 more shares for $466.
So we have 34 shares now and a total amount invested of $1,491 and a cost basis of $4,386. So again, we dropped that nearly $3 with just that little $465 purchase. And that's what I really want to illustrate.
You don't have to put $1,000 into these things. If you put little chunks in, you can drop your cost basis. And I wouldn't recommend this for the ETFs or the yield maxes or the round hills, any of those ETFs, this is mainly just for stocks that you plan on keeping because you're basically trying to get your cost basis down so that when it goes to where it should be, you have a really good, healthy return in your capital appreciation.
Plus you're getting dividends except for Chipotle. They don't have a dividend. Except for Chipotle.
Chipotle is one of the growth ones because again, the stock split episode that we did, it showed that most of the time when those big companies do those stock splits, they usually get back up to that price that they stock split from. It's just a longer hold game. It's happened with Chipotle before.
It's happened with what, Amazon, NVIDIA. NVIDIA, Walmart, Apple, Tesla, all the ones. Walmart was the other one.
So that was a pattern play. The next example we have from the portfolio is in the retirement account. Again, most of these are from the retirement account.
That's where we get the stocks that we want to hold for like 10, 20 years is Ozark Bank, OZK. We bought 58 shares for $2,978 on January 21st of this year, which came out to a cost basis of $51.35. Then on May 29th, 2025, we bought 11 more shares for $490. So we now had 69 shares and the total amount invested of $3,468 and a cost basis of 5026.
Again, there it is, a little less than $500 extra, dropped it $1.09. Then on June 30th, we bought seven more shares for $331. We now had 76 shares and a total amount invested of $3,799 and a cost basis of $4,999. That dropped a lot.
And then on August 4th of 2025, then we bought six more shares for $289. We now currently hold 82 shares and a total amount invested of $4,088 with a cost basis of $4,985. So we dropped that $51.35, so $1.50, which is those little micro transactions, considering how much we initially put into this.
But that's a perfect example of what I think traditional dollar cost averaging is. You just put a little bit in here and there, but you'll see there's no set timetable. It's just kind of like, oh, well, it's under $50, buy some more.
They don't usually talk about the value perspective. They just talk about equal time increments, period. That's stupid.
I don't disagree with you on that one, because you could add a little more oomph to your thing by just being a little more attentive to pattern band trades. Okay. And then we had two more.
This is the last one where we actually went down. It's ADM. It's the corn one.
We bought 40 shares for $2,038 on January 28th, 2025, which came out to be $50.94. And then on June 10th, we bought 20 more shares for $968. So that brought us up to 60 shares and a total amount invested of $3,006 with a cost basis of $50.09. This one's been really good. I know it had a really, really shitty day.
It was down like 10% today. But even with that 10% drop, it's still like at $56, $57. So we're up $7 on 60 shares.
It's $400. Did you say it went down 50% today? No, it went down $3. So it was down like 8 or 9%.
What'd you say from 50? I got that confused. Oh, 56. Oh, 56, okay.
56, 57. That's what I heard. So that's again, because I'm familiar with ADM, because I feel like, I had it on a watch list.
Like we remember eons ago, we talked about like anytime you come across an interesting potential investment, you put it on the watch list and become familiar with it. Well, I became familiar with ADM. So I knew that anytime it was below like $51, that was a good time to buy.
So you'll see that both the times I dipped my toe into it, it was below $51. Now it's at 56. So it's not time to put it in.
But if it drops below $51, I'll probably have some cash and I'll get some more shares of ADM. Same thing with Ozark. Anytime the one we just mentioned, OZK, anytime it drops below $50, to me, that's a buy because it should be around $60.
So that's a good valuation. So that's why Ozark, we had four different times, we put like a little bit of money into it. I feel like we should name your strategy of dollar cost averaging, because it's like turbocharging dollar cost averaging or leveraging dollar cost averaging.
It's like leverage, yeah. But not the leverage everybody else has. It's like familiarity with your holdings.
That's why like... There has to be a better name for it. We have like... Because it's a different flavor. In the two portfolios, we have over 40 stocks each.
So that's obviously too big for most people. But I have like a spreadsheet and a research problem. So I'm pretty much... A research problem.
I'm pretty much familiar with all of them. But if you have like a traditional portfolio of say like eight to 20 stocks, you should be really well versed in like what all eight to 20 of those stocks do. And anytime that it's a good time to buy, you will know because you're familiar with it.
They should be like your children or your spouse. You should know them. If you're depending on these to like fund your retirement, you should know them way more intimately than what people do.
That's just my opinion. And the last one is ES. It's an electric company.
We bought 43 shares for $2,384 on February 12th, 2024, which came out to a cost basis of $55.45. Then on April 11th, 2024, we bought nine more shares for $529, which brought us up to 52 shares and a total amount invested of $2,914 and a cost basis of $56.03. Again, you can see that this one went up a lot. It went up like 58 cents, which is that little $500 purchase. And then on July 16th, 2024, we bought 17 more shares for $1,014, brought us up to 69 shares and a total amount invested of $3,928 and a cost basis of $56.92. But if you're familiar, if you're a longtime listener, you know to me, ES should be at least $80.
So anytime I have money laying around with nothing else, with a good deal to buy, and this is under $60, I buy shares in it. Unfortunately, it hasn't been the case for like a year now. You mean unfortunately? Unfortunately, well, I mean- Oh, you mumbled.
I thought you said fortunately. I was like, how is that fortunate? But what you can see with these, these are actual transactions. I went back into the transaction history.
And he hates doing that. I pulled up all the different times where we actually put money into stocks that we held because I noticed the pattern. Like I can't stress this enough.
You become familiar with what you hold because they all have patterns that you can actually use to your benefit. Now this isn't the traditional sense of dollar cost averaging, but to me, it's the same concept. Why you do dollar cost averaging is to make you have a better cost basis.
I would call this like a hybrid version or a- But like, so if the whole objective is a better cost basis- Value dollar cost averaging? Band dollar cost averaging? I don't know. But if the whole purpose of dollar cost averaging is to have more money invested, more time in the market with a better cost basis, then why would you not use the patterns to your benefit? Yes. Nine of the ten times that we brought up here, it shrank our cost basis by a pretty substantial amount.
It wasn't like there wasn't one where it went from like $50 down to $49.80 or some shit like that. It went down like dollars. Well, so what you're just saying, and we just talked about there's so many different micro-strategies in investing, and a lot of people tend to pick one instead of using them all to their advantage when they're appropriate.
It reminds me of an example they used in one of the books I was reading about riding bikes better. There was apparently a team that had issues with their performance, and what they did was they went and they figured out everything they possibly could do to shave time off of riding, and instead of picking one or two, they literally did all of it. And each one shaved off a little bit, shaved off a little bit, shaved off a little bit, shaved off a little bit.
It's the compound factor of all the micro-variables shaving off that time. So the same thing you could definitely have happen with investing. You could do dollar cost averaging, but value-based, but then the dividend approach, and then we have different strategies for the ETFs, we have different strategies for the round hills and the yield max, we have slightly different tweaks.
I mean, it's a little more complex in the bike example because it's one specific goal, but our goal is more maximizing our money and churning it over faster. That's why we do some gross stocks, that's why we do- Most of these are dividend growers. Yeah, but we do do gross stocks.
We do do gross stocks, and again, the stock split concept, where what was the probability of a stock split from the top to back where it goes and then going back to where it started? It's pretty high. The probability was really, really high. It's like 75%.
So if we have the cash and we see one of those situations, like with Target, Walmart, and I think we bought- Chipotle. Chipotle. We buy it when that stock split happens and then let it go back up to think because you're getting that value increase.
I did with Nvidia, we got Nvidia for $100 and it's at $200, so we've actually doubled our money in Nvidia because of the stock split. That's what I'm saying, so again- The only reason I bought Nvidia was because it had a stock split. Yeah, and that's what I'm saying- So we're not trying to shave off timing from a bike race.
We're trying to shave off years of being able to retire by upping our income, by generating as much capital as possible to dump back into the good investments to churn everything over. So if we can micro-churn in all these other areas or like micro-increase and micro-this, micro-that, that's how we're doing that extra stuff. But eventually, once we hit our goals, we can take maybe a lot more like, I don't want to say like micromanaging of the portfolio out of the mix, but- No, like it's something that we always do.
Because we even talked about the dividend round hill and yield max. So Tim was telling me that like the ex-dividend date, you could literally just watch those and then get in right before because it tells you what they're paying before it actually comes out for you to be locked in. I was like, what? How has nobody even talked about this as a strategy? Well, yeah, round hill, I get an email every Thursday about what the dividends are going to be for Tuesday, but you have to be in it by the close of business on Monday.
So if you get the email on Thursday, you can pick the stock up on Friday, whichever one pays the most. That blows my mind that that's even a thing. And then you get the dividend, then you get paid on Tuesday.
That blows my mind, that's a thing. Like that doesn't happen with other dividend stocks, does it? That doesn't happen. No, they generally like do it during earnings, which is, you know, every three months.
And they say, well, our next dividend is going to be this. Yeah, like that's crazy. That's crazy to me that you could, again, if you had the time and even with those, the fact that ex-dividend dates cause a drop when the actual dividend pays out.
So you could actually like either get in before knowing that thing in front or you get in right after that drop and then deal with, there's like just ways like micro compound. Like it's just, it's crazy. Obviously more time goes into all of those strategies, but when you don't have a ton of capital that you're working with and you really, really, really are hungry to decouple your time for money sooner than later, micro strategies.
You find out, you find out how to do things. Not the stock. Okay.
So that is our foray into the Tim's version of dollar cost averaging. We're going to come up with a better name. It's super cool.
Next week is going to piss some people off. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
It's going to piss a lot of people off. It's a very controversial hot button topic. If you're one of them, I'm apologizing a week ahead of time.
But next week we're going to go into gold. Don't, don't, don't spoil it. Don't spoil it.
And is it a good investment or not? Is it really a good investment? It's going to piss a lot of people off. Okay. Toodles.
Hopefully we actually have voices next time. See you guys next week. Not from like a dungeon.