I wasted 10 years trying to get rich from crypto when I could have just DCA'd $500/week into the S&P 500
u/No_Return6011 ·
Reddit — r/investing
· September 03, 2026 at 18:48
· ⬆ 263 pts
· 💬 132 comments
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AI Summary
Summary
The author shares a cautionary tale of spending 10 years gambling on highly volatile cryptocurrencies, experiencing massive portfolio swings but ultimately underperforming.
The core thesis is that a simple, disciplined Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) strategy of $500/week into the S&P 500 would have yielded significantly higher and more stable returns ($800K-$1M) over the same decade.
Quality assessment: This is a personal anecdote and reflection (noise/psychology) rather than well-researched fundamental due diligence, serving primarily as a behavioral finance lesson.
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I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially now with my wife and kids.
I got into crypto in 2017 and saw my investment go from $30K USD to $600K USD in about 3 months. Instead of selling into USD, I allocated into shittier projects and within 6 months I was back to my original investment.
Ever since, I have tried to get back to that number via cryptos, and somehow I'm sitting here today with an investable asset of $60K.
Over the last 10 years, my cryptos went 30K->600K->30K->300K->50K->200K->50K
It's been painful to ruin my family's financial life, but I'm also realising what would have happened if I'd done something incredibly boring instead.
$500/week invested into an S&P 500 index fund for 10 years.
So I checked the numbers and compared that hypothetical portfolio with what actually happened to my money.
The result honestly made me a little sick.
I would have today approximately: $800K-1m
I think I've spent years looking for the investment that could make me rich instead of appreciating how much consistent investing could have done on its own.
Curious if anyone else has done this calculation for themselves.
Update:
Since I see posts asking about the calculation, I simply relied on these numbers for the normal DCA [https://www.steadygrow.io/what-if/500-weekly-since-2015](https://www.steadygrow.io/what-if/500-weekly-since-2015)
A hypothetical $500/week DCA into the S&P 500 over the last 10 years would have grown to approximately $800K-$1M. Broad market index funds provide consistent, compounding growth that historically outperforms active trading and speculative gambling in highly volatile asset classes like crypto. Investors should prioritize boring, consistent DCA strategies into broad market indices (like SPY or VOO) over attempting to get rich quick with speculative assets. A prolonged macroeconomic downturn or lost decade in US equities could suppress index returns, though DCA mitigates timing risk.
This Reddit post, published September 03, 2026,
features u/No_Return6011
discussing SPY.
1 trade idea extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.