The DCA

Most of what's in your account got there by schedule, not by decision. Daily, weekly, biweekly — same symbol, same size, same trigger: whatever date it is. The market goes up, you buy. It goes down, you buy. It does nothing, you buy. You did the thinking once, then you stopped. Most of the time, this is the right call.

Behind every recurring buy is a single decision someone made at a specific moment: this ticker, this size, this cadence. After that, the decision-maker walked away. The machine kept going. What we're typing is not the dollars going in — it's the relationship the dollars have with your attention. Which is none.

At small dollar amounts this is investing on autopilot — Vanguard, Fidelity, your 401(k). At large dollar amounts it's still autopilot, just with more weight on a decision you may not have revisited in years. The question isn't whether the strategy is working. The question is whether you'd make the same decision today, with what you know now, that you made when you set this up.

Market opens. Your buy fires. You don't see it because you don't open the app. The notification gets dismissed. By the end of the week there are five buys you don't remember placing because in the literal sense, you didn't place them.

Earnings season comes and goes. Crashes come and go. The Fed cuts. The Fed hikes. The schedule does not care. When you do open the account it's because someone asked you about it at dinner, and you realize you haven't looked in months. The number is bigger or smaller than you thought. You close the app. The schedule keeps going.

Once a year, on the same date, open the account. Look at every recurring stream. For each one, ask: would you start this stream today, at this size, into this ticker, with what you know now?

If yes, keep it. If no, change it. The answer is rarely "stop entirely" — the autopilot is doing real work. But the ticker you picked three years ago for reasons you no longer remember might not be the ticker you'd pick today. The autopilot doesn't ask. You have to.