$30/day of BTC to $1M: bullshit?

$30/day of BTC to $1M: bullshit?

Recently we came across this post.

It says a guy bought $30 of Bitcoin every day for 7 years or something, and reached a $1M portfolio.

We also found a series of similar reposts, with numbers getting more and more crazy:

With our nose deep in Strategy Lab development, Bitcoin DCA strategies and charts, the number felt strange immediately.

Our local Bitcoin DCA runs were landing somewhere else, like 30%ish lower than the less crazy of the claims, on all the tested periods, and nothing was making sense in any of the posts we checked.

Either our backtesting engine was off, or this post was BS.

So we dug a bit. We had to know if Strategy Lab was cursed.

And we found the real source is Rego, @regothetrader on X:

Rego documented his Bitcoin DCA journey publicly. This is the original post, and it gives us the missing piece: the correct starting date.

Starting at the end of 2016 (26/12), and as far as we know, he is still on it today: buying $30 of Bitcoin every day, no matter what.

So we set up a strategy in Strategy Lab to do exactly what he did, so we could check whether our own backtesting results were matching his public posts.

If Rego kept applying it like a metronome, as recent posts appear to suggest, here is where it sits now:

Strategy Lab backtest for Rego's $30/day Bitcoin DCA reconstruction

If the reconstruction is close enough, the result is brutal: 11+ BTC accumulated at an average entry around $9K/BTC (about $104K deployed total), a portfolio now sitting deep in profit, but also a path that required eating a max drawdown of almost 80% without stopping.

Of course, our simulations are necessarily a little bit different from his actual results:

1/ We used daily candles, while Rego said he buys $15 every 12 hours.

For the moment, our Strategy Lab PoC focuses on the daily chart of Bitcoin, and only one execution is possible per day. We simplified this by executing one buy every day.

2/ Also: different exchange rates, fees, exact execution prices and time, many factors can explain slight differences.

But we were pleased to discover his $1M milestone claim also matched our backtest results, within two days:

Strategy Lab chart showing Rego's reconstructed Bitcoin DCA crossing the $1M milestone near November 2024

Our backtesting tool was not off, the $1M number was not invented. It just derailed in a very X fashion over the years.

Most reposts about Rego are false, or at least incomplete. But once you dig a bit, there is a real gem underneath: DCA applied for almost a decade, like a proper psychopath.

In a next addition, we might show how small variations around Rego’s strategy could have changed the results.

For example: what happens if we skip the days when Bitcoin looks too extended, and deploy more aggressively around key zones instead? How does it affect the final result? Are there periods where it helps, and periods where it is a bad idea?

Of course, the whole point of DCA is to remove the burden of deciding when to buy. But with Strategy Lab, one can define a more complex strategy once, then let it execute without managing any decision.

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