# DCA

> Dollar-cost averaging strategy for scheduled, automated trades.

- URL: https://docs.sumo.trade/strategies/dca
- Markdown: https://docs.sumo.trade/strategies/dca.md
- Docs index: https://docs.sumo.trade/llms.txt

DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) executes trades at regular intervals, spreading your buying or selling over time to reduce the impact of price volatility.

> **Video: DCA Strategies Deep Dive**
>
> A walkthrough of configuring DCA buys and sells, intervals, budgets, durations, and jitter.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk6gVUyLfL4

![Create DCA strategy](/images/strategy-dca.png)

## How It Works

1. You configure a trade amount, frequency, and duration
2. Sumo executes a trade at each interval
3. Jitter randomizes both the timing and amount to make trades less predictable on-chain
4. The strategy runs until the duration or budget is reached, or you deactivate it

## Strategy Types

* **Buy** — Accumulate tokens over time by buying at regular intervals
* **Sell** — Distribute tokens over time by selling at regular intervals

## Configuration

### Trade Amount

The size of each individual trade. Select the unit:

* **USD** — Dollar value per trade
* **Quote** (e.g. SOL, WETH, WBNB) — Quote asset amount per trade
* **Token** — Number of tokens per trade

### Spend Budget

Optional maximum total amount to trade before the strategy stops. You can set the budget in **USD**, **Quote**, or **Token** units. Leave empty for no budget limit.

### Frequency

How often the strategy executes a trade:

* Enter a number and select the unit: **Seconds**, **Minutes**, **Hours**, or **Days**
* Example: "5 Minutes" means one trade every 5 minutes

### Jitter

Randomize the trade timing and amount to make your pattern less detectable on-chain:

| Field                       | Description                                                                                                                     |
| --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Trade Amount Jitter (%)** | Randomizes the trade size by this percentage. E.g. 10% jitter on a $500 trade means each trade is between $450–$550.            |
| **Interval Jitter (%)**     | Randomizes the interval by this percentage. E.g. 10% jitter on a 60s interval means trades execute between 54–66 seconds apart. |

### Duration

How long the strategy runs:

* **Cycles** — Execute a fixed number of trades, then stop
* **Infinite** (∞) — Run indefinitely until manually deactivated

### Wallet

Choose which wallets execute the trades — all wallets, a wallet group, or an individual wallet.

### Slippage

Set the maximum price movement Sumo should allow for each DCA trade.

### Private Relay

On supported EVM profiles, you can enable **MEV protection using Private Relays**. This routes eligible trades through private relays to reduce public mempool exposure.

### Sell All Available Tokens

For DCA Sell strategies, you can enable **Sell all available tokens on insufficient balance**. If a planned sell is larger than the wallet's token balance, Sumo retries once using the wallet's available token balance instead of simply skipping that wallet.

## Strategy List View

Active DCA strategies display:

| Column           | Description                                            |
| ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ |
| **Trade Amount** | Amount per trade with jitter range (e.g. "$450–$550")  |
| **Interval**     | Time between trades with jitter range (e.g. "54s–66s") |
| **Duration**     | Number of cycles or ∞ for infinite                     |
| **Budget**       | Spend progress when a budget is configured             |
| **Net Change**   | Cumulative base and quote asset changes                |

## Use Cases

* **Accumulating a position** — DCA Buy to gradually build a token position without spiking the price
* **Distributing tokens** — DCA Sell to offload tokens smoothly over time
* **Market activity** — Run both buy and sell DCA strategies to maintain consistent trading activity on your token
* **Low-balance cleanup** — Use sell-all-on-insufficient-balance when you want a DCA Sell to drain smaller wallet balances gracefully

- [Limit Orders](/strategies/limit-orders): Execute trades when market cap conditions are met.

- [Counter Trade](/strategies/counter-trade): Automatically counter external trades to stabilize price.