Dollar Cost Averaging: Managing Volatility Systematically

With the recent volatile markets and uncertainty in consumer sentiment, dollar cost averaging has been a popular topic as of late. What makes up this strategy? Is it for all investors or just for certain goals? In this episode we discuss all of that and more! Jon Erlichman, Founder of Ticker Take joins Cassidy Clement to discuss.

Summary – Cents of Security Podcasts Ep. 99

Cassidy Clement
Welcome back to the Sense of Security podcast. I’m Cassidy Clement, Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Interactive Brokers, and today I’m your host for the podcast. Our guest is Jon Erlichman; founder of Ticker Take. With the recent volatile markets and uncertainty in consumer sentiment, dollar cost averaging has been a popular topic as of late. But what exactly makes up this strategy?

Is it for all investors, or just certain goals? These are the types of questions we’re going to ask—and hopefully answer—today in our episode. Welcome to the program, Jon.

Jon Erlichman
Cassie, it’s great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me on the pod.

Cassidy Clement
Yeah, of course. So, I know that your videos are on the IBKR Campus in the Traders Insight area, and we talked a little bit about your background as a financial journalist. So, other than that—to just intro you into your first episode here on Sense of Security—what is your background in the industry? Tell the listeners a little bit about yourself.

Jon Erlichman
Absolutely, I’d love to. And by the way, it’s great to be part of your extended online family, because it’s a wonderful resource for so many people to learn about the markets.

I mean, my journey is basically 25 years of covering the markets, largely as a journalist—mainly working at a lot of financial television stations over the years. Worked a lot of years with Bloomberg, covering the markets from New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And over the years, as the industry started to change—in other words, people being able to invest in new, exciting ways, doing it online—it felt like the content increasingly was gravitating online.

So, I had a very rewarding career, but I also looked at the opportunity in front of us—to talk to more people where increasingly they are. And so, that was one of the reasons why I decided to launch Ticker Take, which is my YouTube channel and my social media channels, where we still do some of the traditional content that I did for so many years on television.

But we’re also just exploring the way by which people learn about the markets on their phone. And actually, that’s been really exciting, because it feels like each and every day, more and more people are starting to get access to the markets. If not just because they’re trading online, they might learn about a particular stock or investment just by perusing their phone.

So, it’s been a really interesting time to launch something new. Still love the way that traditional news is done, but it’s been an exciting new adventure for me.

Cassidy Clement
Yeah, that’s actually rather aligned with how this podcast got started. There’s a lot of different people in different scenarios, and different—we’ll say—educational backgrounds, that people have getting into financial journeys, if you will, these days.

You don’t necessarily have to, you know, know a friend at a bank to be exposed to the potential of trading. So that’s kind of how you—our listeners—are likely listening to us right now, on their phones.

So with today’s topic, we’re talking dollar cost averaging. I think that has been one of the buzzwords that I have heard the most in the past quarter—right up there with tariffs and inflation. Dollar cost averaging comes in hot at number three.

Jon Erlichman
Yeah.

Cassidy Clement
You know, just to break it down—if you can give a quick example maybe, or an explanation of what it is. I’m sure a lot of listeners are going to listen to this, and their first thought process is going to be, “Is that like how I used to put 25 cents into my piggy bank as a kid?”

Or, depending on where you are in your financial journey, that sounds a little bit like a 401(k). Why don’t you take it away and give them the financial answer?

Jon Erlichman
Well, you’re so right, Cassidy. We do hear dollar cost averaging referenced all the time. I feel like sometimes—even though it’s not all that fancy—it’s fancier than it needs to be to explain what it really is, which is committing to investing over the long term.

It’s just—it’s making that decision, rain or shine. And a lot of people do this with their paycheck—finding an amount of money that you feel comfortable consistently putting into the market.

We live in a world where people get excited by a stock story today, and the promise of what an investment could be worth. But in reality, I think history has told us that slow and steady often wins the race.

And that’s not just based on picking the right investment—it’s about being committed to investing on a regular basis. So dollar cost averaging, at the end of the day, is really just averaging out the cost that you’re paying to buy into the stock market.

Jon Erlichman
So maybe you’re committing that $5 on a regular basis. Maybe you’re committing $500 on a regular basis. But it’s making that commitment.

And what I personally love about it is—just like going to the gym—you don’t necessarily want to do it, but you feel like you should. And ultimately, staying healthy is important to anybody’s life.

Staying committed to things that have long-term benefits—I think we all see the value in that. And I think that’s why dollar cost averaging does get a lot of attention, especially when you start to see volatility in the market and people are trying to put a little bit more context around their investment portfolio.

Cassidy Clement
Absolutely. I think a lot of people started to incorporate dollar cost averaging into their conversations—whether it was with their advisors or with their families—when it came to financial goals.

Probably because you hear that age-old, we’ll say, adage of “buy low, sell high.” And we had a lot of lows recently. And some people said, “Well, I’m just going to keep—like you said—slow and steady, rain or shine.

If I have a hundred dollars I’m putting in, I’m still putting in a hundred. Maybe I get more bang for my buck now.” But the flip of that, of course, is if it keeps going lower—or depending on your time horizon…

Cassidy Clement
But the flip of that, of course, is—if it keeps going lower, or depending on your time horizon—that kind of leads me into my next question, which is:

For dollar cost averaging, in a general sense, is it really for all investors, or is it for certain types of goals or those with resources?

Because at most of the core of different financial strategies, the first thing the average Joe asks is, “Okay, does it really work though—with my goals in mind?”

Jon Erlichman
That’s probably the first question that anybody should ask. And I’m so glad you brought it up because in all my years of covering the markets and talking to a lot of market pros, there’s always a beehive of activity around people who want to know what they should invest in—what’s the stock to go for?

But most commonly, the response to that is, “Well, what kind of investor are you?”

I think to answer your question—Is dollar cost averaging for everyone?—not necessarily. But I use that analogy of going to the gym earlier. You could probably use that for dollar cost averaging as well.

Going to the gym has a lot of benefits if you’re concerned about your long-term health. Dollar cost averaging—if you’re trying to save for the future and build a nest egg—can definitely be one of the real helping hands.

Jon Erlichman
Does everybody use it? No. Do people have different ways by which they invest or different ways by which they work out? Absolutely.

And most importantly—what kind of workout are you doing at the gym based on who you are—is the same question as: what kind of investor are you, and what are your goals?

So I think since every portfolio depends on the person, dollar cost averaging is something that’s going to be meaningful to more people than others—significant to some.

But it is still, at the end of the day, something that, net-net, most of the pros seem to think is kind of a no-brainer if you can get into it.

Cassidy Clement
You brought up the benefits area and the analogy of the gym.

Jon Erlichman
I’m not a gym rat—I could use more time working out, for what it’s worth.

Cassidy Clement
Yeah, a lot of my gym experience is really walking the dog. But I totally get what you’re saying in the sense of, “Okay, well, if you do X, Y is likely the outcome.”

But when you start to do research into dollar cost averaging, this is a little bit more than just a standard Google. When you start to compile many different resources, you’ll start to realize the benefits and risks associated—it varies depending on the research that you’re reading.

Cassidy Clement
One big thing that I noticed was the discipline area—meaning, if you have the discipline and the financial possibility to consistently invest that amount of money and have that discipline, you can kind of curb, if you will, a little bit more of the emotional bias or the immediate hype or FOMO, if you will.

Because you’re putting yourself on a little bit more of a rigid path. You have a bit of a map.

But from your perspective, as somebody who’s seen many different markets—and seen it from the perspective of several opinions and the actual outcome—what are the benefits and risks associated, especially if you are at different time horizons utilizing the strategy?

Jon Erlichman
That is such a great question. And I guess there’s two parts to it. I have seen a lot of markets over the years. And I guess, starting with the risk—let’s talk about the reality that stocks do go down.

They do go up, but we never quite know what’s going to happen. And I think it is fair to say, if you buy a stock and that stock goes down, it doesn’t always make you feel all that excited or positive—unless you’re shorting a stock or what have you.

Jon Erlichman
And when we are in periods of volatility, it is not uncommon to see those dramatic declines on a short-term basis. I mean, listen—I’m old enough that I remember being on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the Great Recession. And those momentous drops when everybody thought, “Okay, maybe we’re turning a corner,” and then—not so much.

So, if you are dollar cost averaging, if you’ve made that commitment to invest over the long term, and all of a sudden your weekly or monthly amount goes into the market and the market goes down—that probably doesn’t feel good.

So that probably would be characterized as a risk. That’s certainly a risk: that when you are dollar cost averaging, that possibly could take a short-term bite out of your portfolio.

But you also talked about trying to take some of the emotion out of the market. And look—the emotion is what certainly creates a lot of action in the short term.

There are some investors—arguably professional investors—who can really ride the wave of emotions in the market in the short term. But most experts who you talk to would suggest that trying to time the market and letting your emotions get into the investing process doesn’t necessarily work out the way you might hope.

Jon Erlichman
And people who are looking to build wealth over the long term—if that is the goal in the end—we talked earlier about, like, what are your goals as an investor?

Then there’s a very strong argument to be made that you’re taking some of the emotion out of the market by being just more machine-like with this investing strategy.

It’s like you’re accepting there are going to be up days. You’re accepting there’s going to be down days.

But for the stock market—which over the long term, with those historic annualized returns for the S&P 500—that it’s going to be your friend.

And it’s interesting—outside of hot topics like dollar cost averaging—there’s been a lot of buzz around people like Warren Buffett, right?

He’s got this big cash pile right now. “What does Warren know that we don’t know?”—all that kind of stuff. That’s a fun short-term story to talk about.

The long-term story is that Warren Buffett is still committed to the stock market. He still has a huge amount of Berkshire Hathaway’s money dedicated to equities.

And he has, over the long run, been one of those investors who stays committed to most of those investments for many, many years.

Jon Erlichman
So if you want to be like Warren Buffett, you probably want to take some of the emotion out of the market, and you probably want to embrace what dollar cost averaging can afford you in the future—even if it means some short-term risks of sometimes buying stocks right as they’re going down.

Cassidy Clement
You had mentioned a few keywords there that I picked up on—and because my background is SEO, my head immediately highlights keywords.

Alright, there’s “commitment” to this strategy. There’s the “long-term” aspect in this strategy. There’s the idea—and we’ve talked about this a lot on this podcast—of the differentiation between being a trader and being an investor.

And that has a huge impact on how this strategy can be utilized.

But also, it’s important to remember, for those of you who listen who maybe have heard our quant podcast or our API podcast—in this scenario, it’s almost as if you are the algo.

You have the directions, and you follow those directions. And that’s where you start to alleviate that behavioral finance aspect, or the additional pieces of consumer sentiment, etc.

Cassidy Clement
You don’t have that adaptation. It’s not adaptive programming in that sense—you kind of just have the roadmap and you go.

But when it comes to dollar cost averaging, the initial thought process is: I’m going to try to reduce the volatility impact on me long-term, because I myself am committing to this structure.

So by the end of the time, I know that if I set aside the 50K, and I’m going to do $100 a week, by the end of this I will still have invested 50K. That’s my map, and we’ll see where I get to—and hopefully the volatility impact will have been in the positive at the end of that time that I’ve spent that money.

But from your perspective—especially with the current market conditions, which as we’ve seen have been relatively unpredictable, quite volatile, and have this weird wishy-washy aroma of “sometimes consumer sentiment matters, sometimes it doesn’t”—what are some things to keep in mind if you’re going to incorporate this into a financial strategy that you’re just starting, with today’s economic environment?

Jon Erlichman
You could add to that—I don’t know the math on this—but when you’re in a relatively strong market, as we had been coming into this year, inevitably that introduces new people to the stock market.

I mean, that’s just the bottom line.
If you hear about people who are making money because stocks have been going up, that’s going to make somebody else curious.

So, I’m sure that has been a bit of sticker shock to people who became first-time investors in 2025. And wow, what a ride it’s been.

The funny thing about volatility—and actually, on our Ticker Take YouTube channel, we just put out a video last week about some of the biggest mistake’s investors make. The fact that it’s hard to time the market, that you want to leave your emotions on the sidelines if you’re making decisions that are based around actual goals—not whatever the headlines of the day.

But another one—a long-time strategist named Philip Peterson—he noted that sometimes people, average investors, look at volatility almost like it’s a dirty word that’s reserved for traders who do this professionally and ride into the storm of the markets.

And Philip’s view is: there’s a lot of good historical data that when there are times of volatility, those are the kinds of moments when investors should be embracing the storm—especially if they are long-term investors.

That you get out of these periods that feel unsettled, and sometimes some of the mismatch that’s in the market at those points in time is exactly what you’re looking for to maximize your returns over the long term.

So I think there’s some parallels between this question about dollar cost averaging and volatile times, and the risk of a stock going down when you’re dollar cost averaging.

Right now, we’ve seen some high days for the market this year. We’ve seen some historically low days. So that can be daunting.

But there is some evidence that embracing these periods of uncertainty isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the long term.

If you’ve decided what kind of investor you are before you sail into what might look like a storm, hopefully it’s going to feel a little bit more comforting to just go into those choppier waters.

But at the end of the day, it’s a great question—and it’s been a bumpy ride. And it’s a fair question for people to ask.

Cassidy Clement
The idea of it being a bumpy ride for most people, I think, is the… I think you had said it’s almost like a sticker shock when you open up the webpage of whatever financial website or editorial that you look at every morning—it does seem to be a little unpredictable.

And that kind of impacts the way that people are starting to incorporate or blend or mesh together different types of strategies to help bolster any type of risk aversion—or, if they don’t have the time horizon that they thought they were going to have, change that up.

I think the talk around retirement is a very big one. It’s funny—or we should say funny in the sense of “intellectually funny”—how America, as it starts to move on to being more and more developed, somehow people are working longer and longer and longer.

As we start to go through that, the retirement portfolios within the past year—or we’ll say six months—sometimes there’s some sticker shock to that. And people are starting to look for other financial strategies to incorporate to hold on to the potential of whether it’s retirement or larger purchases in their lives.

So when it comes to dollar cost averaging, are there other ways to blend it with financial strategies, or is it just something that you need to keep an eye on constantly because of risk aversion?

Jon Erlichman
Well—by the way, if not going to the gym means that I think a little bit less about how many years I’m going to live and paying for that, maybe that’s my weird justification for not going.

But I’m going to pick that I’m going to stay healthy as long as I can.

But you raise an excellent point. People are living longer, healthier lives. That’s an amazing development for our species.

It does open up the door to more money questions—or making your money goals stretch a little bit longer.

Simple answer to that is: dollar cost averaging—and this is more my opinion than anything else. I do talk to a lot of the pros about it—it feels like a garnish on the salad. You know what I mean? You’ve got other stuff in there, and it’s probably going to taste pretty good if you mix it all up together.

Just because there are so many different ways by which you construct a portfolio.

Let’s talk about portfolio construction. I’m sure a lot of people over the last 12 months have been trying to figure out what kind of leanings or weightings they want to have in their portfolio.

Every day we’re hearing, “Are those incredible runs we saw in tech stocks going to now cool off? Are we entering a new period, a new phase, a new cycle?”

People individually have to figure out what a portfolio rebalance means for them.

You raised the point of “When do you need the money?” That’s probably one of the key considerations. If you’re an older investor and you’re allocating a certain amount of your investment portfolio to your retirement, you might have a different philosophy on that versus those who think AI is going to change the world and are just going to be really loaded into growth stocks.

When you are rebalancing, there is an argument to be made that if you are still committing capital to the market, it can be helpful.

Let’s just leave out returns for a second. Because we haven’t really talked about: what’s the alternative to dollar cost averaging? How are you going to have a pool of capital that you can hopefully grow through stock market investing?

And everybody is different. Sometimes all of a sudden you—maybe you have a very nice family member who leaves you an inheritance or what have you—and then all of a sudden, you’ve got that to work for you. Or maybe there’s just a moment in time where you feel like, “Okay, I really want to get started in the stock market. So I’ve set aside this chunk of money and I’m going to put it in.”

But you’re not normally in positions like that.

I just feel like dollar cost averaging—again, we kind of use the salad topping analogy—you don’t necessarily for all of eternity need to be dollar cost averaging. But anytime you can add it to the mix, it’s probably going to be helpful overall to what you’re doing.

So those are a couple of key things to think about with strategy overall.

One other thing—actually, just for our latest Ticker Take YouTube channel video—we decided to explore the concept of dividend investing. So, we looked at all aspects of it.

We looked at what makes a company a good candidate for your portfolio as a dividend payer. But it also invited a big conversation in our video around what your net return as an investor might look like over time through the different levers that you can pull.

If you’re looking at pure stock appreciation for the last couple of years, people will name all those usual suspects in tech as the places that delivered outsized returns. But if you go and talk to a dividend investor—and some have found religion in dividend investing over the years—they will point out that oftentimes it is that combination of the dividend payment and the potential growth for the company that is delivering on those dividends combined that delivers you a return that is respectable.

And we don’t always talk about that in financial media on a day-to-day basis, because we’re watching stocks and watching the percentage moves on stocks. But dividends can make a difference.

And then they can make an even bigger difference in the portfolio if you exercise different strategies.

One of the pros in our video talks about DRIP programs—these dividend reinvestment programs. It’s one thing to be getting the dividend by owning the dividend stock. It’s another to be telling someone who’s helping you with your portfolio—or just setting it up yourself if you’re managing your portfolio yourself—to say, “Let’s take all those dividends and let’s reinvest those back into the stock.”

So those dividend reinvestment programs are really helpful over the long term for investors.

And again, that feels like something in the salad alongside dollar cost averaging, right?

If you’ve said, “I want to put money to work in the market consistently over time,” in one statement. And then in a second statement you say, “I want to take my dividends from my dividend stocks and reinvest them in the dividend stocks so I can own more shares”—you’ve got these parallel paths of committing more capital, essentially, to the stock market.

So the long and short of it is that people have tons of different financial strategies that they use. And in a lot of the conversations I’ve had, most people see dollar cost averaging as additive to those strategies—if you can swing it.

Cassidy Clement
Definitely. It’s one of the tools in the Swiss Army knife, that kind of scenario.

It’s by no means an alternative for research or somehow foolproof for applicability and a market condition firewall. This is something that helps keep you disciplined in a certain area—especially the area of a long-term investment such as the 401(k).

I think throughout my research, dollar cost averaging—or PCA, however you would like to call it, name it—it’s meant to help with risk mitigation.

But it’s also not a set-it-and-forget-it scenario. So much of it leans on the idea of market condition and applicability that you can’t just consistently do that and always think everything’s going to be a winner—because that’s just not the right way to think when it comes to the markets.

But thanks so much for joining us today.

Jon Erlichman
Cassie, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks very much for having me on the podcast.

Cassidy Clement
Yeah, of course. So, as always, listeners can learn more about an array of financial topics for free at interactivebrokers.com/campus.

Follow us on your favorite podcast network, and feel free to leave us a rating or review.

Thanks for listening, everyone.