Monthly payments,same fund, different price?

[goodandbadjapan]

I think that would probably help both of us!

[RetireJapan]

I'm not entirely sure what the problem is here.

It would be nice to buy things now for the price they had last year (Apple shares?) but it's not possible.

Regular purchases mean you get to buy when things dip as well as when they go up so should smooth over time (and hopefully go up over time).

Getting fixated on the price something had in the past is usually a bad idea when investing. The only price that matters is the current one. Is it attractive? Is the asset worth that much now, based on the available information? Is there something better you could buy for the same price?

[Tomthumb16]

Fair enough!
I am probably as I said in my first post overthinking it.
Cheers

[jcc]

Think we might be talking at cross purposes. To take simple numbers, lets say you have $30 to spend and units cost $1 dollar each. You buy thirty.

When you are fifty you have another $30 to spend but the price has risen to $3 a unit so you buy ten.

You now have 40 units for which you paid $60. They are worth $120.

The average price you paid is $1.50.

Now you sell them. It doesn't matter what your average price paid for them has become, you will have paid a total of $60 and get $120. It could matter for tax purposes as it would affect the amount of gain made, but as tax isn't an issue here that is irrelevant. To object to the average price increasing seems to be objecting to the fact that the units are now more expensive, but it is that very fact that has seen your original 30 triple in value.

If the price hadn't increased by the time you were fifty and had remained at $1 you would have bought another thirty. In other words you would own 60 units for which you had paid an average of $1. If you sold them you would get $60, which is what you paid. So a higher average price and double your money, or the same average price and no profit.

Now my brain hurts and I'm probably still not making sense!

In general (assuming that the stock market trends upwards in the long term) buying early is better than buying late.

The reason we don't just buy everything early is because we don't have that kind of money to invest now

You should look into the present value(https://www.investopedia.com/walkthroug ... nting.aspx ) to get a better picture.

Money you have now should have a higher future price and money you get in the future should have a discounted value now. It's better to have $100 now than $200 20 years from now(at least assuming there is decent gains in the next 20 years).

But you don't have that money you want to invest now, so you just invest it as you build it up, "dollar cost averaging" along the way, which also protects you from a lot of the volatility(so long as you consistently keep putting money in rather than just running away at every sign of trouble, which is generally the best time to be buying)