Best time to buy bitcoin? The truth is you shouldn't time it

Every time someone learns I write these, the most common question isn't "what to buy," it's: "Zhou An, is now a good time to buy bitcoin? Isn't it too high? Should I wait a bit more?" I totally understand that agonizing, because the person tormented most by those two words, "the timing," was me. At the end of 2021 I felt "get in now or it's too late," put in quite a bit in one go, and right after that 2022 cut the price in half and I sold at a loss at the lows. At its root, my mistake then was taking the buying timing far too seriously.

So in this piece I'm not going to hand you an answer on "should you buy now" — anyone who'll thump their chest and give you that answer is someone you should be a little more careful with. I want to take a different angle: why "chasing the timing" is itself a pit, and how you can actually decide when to act without predicting the price.

The "best time" question is itself a trap

First, a pattern I've watched for years: the people who fixate hardest on "the best time to buy" tend, over the long run, to lose the most. Not because they're unlucky, but because the question pushes them into a few bad behaviors.

One, it keeps you from acting. You always feel "let me wait, there'll be a lower point," and you watch the price climb the whole way without ever really buying for years. Two, it makes you pile in heavy precisely when the price has surged and emotion is hottest — because that's when the "I have to get on board" urgency peaks. Three, it puts all your attention on guessing the price while ignoring the thing that actually decides your outcome: how much you invested, whether you can withstand a drop, whether you'll panic-sell midway.

In other words, the way "best time" is framed steers you, from the start, into a game ordinary people can't win. It assumes you can judge whether the price is high or low — but if you really could, you wouldn't be agonizing at all; you'd just buy low and sell high. The fact that you're agonizing is exactly the sign that, deep down, you know: you can't judge it.

Nobody can consistently call the bottom — not even the pros

Let me say this section plainly: precisely calling the bottom isn't just something ordinary people can't do — almost no one can do it consistently, including the full-time professional institutions.

The word "consistently" is the key. Anyone can fluke a bottom once, but to repeatedly buy at lows and sell at highs across cycle after cycle is extraordinarily rare in the public record. The market is hard because the price already contains everyone's view of the future, and what moves the price sharply is usually news nobody saw coming. The "it should drop now" you can think of, others thought of too — that judgment was priced in long ago.

I'm not saying this to make you despair; I'm saying it to lift an unnecessary burden off you: not being able to time it isn't your failing — the thing itself simply can't be done. Once you accept that, you stop blaming yourself for "not buying the exact bottom," and you stop being dragged along by the illusion that "next time I'll definitely nail it." Admitting you can't read it is actually the clearest judgment you can make.

Before "when to buy," settle "how much to invest"

If timing is this hard to catch, where should your energy actually go? My answer: get "how much to invest" clear first — it matters far more than "when to buy."

The reason is simple. Buying timing at most makes your cost a little higher or a little lower, while position size decides whether a single big drop knocks you flat. Bitcoin's volatility is famous: after its high of around $69,000 in November 2021, it at one point dropped to about $15,500 by November 2022, a fall of roughly 77% (data from public market records). If the money you put in goes beyond what you can bear, then even if you bought at a decent point, that kind of deep paper loss is enough to force you to sell out at the most painful moment.

Conversely, if what you invest is money you can afford to lose in the first place, then buying a bit expensive, or buying at a local high, isn't fatal — you can hold, and so you get the chance to let time average it out. So before agonizing over "is buying now good," answer a different question first: if this money went to zero tomorrow, would my life be affected? How to work out that cap, I wrote in How much should you put into crypto.

DCA: swap the timing problem for a discipline problem

So if you can't rely on prediction, when is the right time to buy? My own answer: don't pin "that one day," pin a rhythm of "always buying." That's the whole point of DCA — it swaps a "timing" problem you can't win for a "discipline" problem you can actually do.

The logic goes like this: since no one can steadily buy at lows, I'll just not guess, and buy a fixed amount at fixed times continuously. When the price is high I buy less, when it's low I buy more, and over the long term the average cost lands at a middling spot instead of being locked dead at some peak. That way, "is today a good time" is no longer fatal to you — because you're not pressing all your chips on a single day, you're spreading them across many days.

This is why I keep stressing: buying in batches makes the timing of any single buy unimportant. You don't need to catch the bottom; you only need to keep buying for a long enough time. To understand this approach more systematically, see DCA or lump sum — the same money, phased or all at once, with trade-offs on each side.

If you must talk timing: don't get carried away at these moments

Having said all this "don't gamble on timing," I get that part of you still wants something concrete about "when not to do something stupid." What I'll give you isn't a "when to buy" signal, but a few "don't get carried away at this kind of moment" warnings. Note: these aren't predicting the top; they're just reminding you not to chase highs.

• When the market is hottest and everyone's talking about getting rich. When even friends who never follow the market start asking you "how do I buy," and social media is wall-to-wall profit screenshots, that usually means emotion is running very hot. This atmosphere is the one most likely to make you want to "raise the amount, speed up the rhythm." It's not that you can't buy here — it's that here, above all, don't add and don't get carried away.
• When waves of leverage liquidations keep showing up. When the news repeatedly carries "billions forcibly liquidated," it means a lot of leverage has been added and emotion is fragile. Volatility gets amplified at times like this and the risk of chasing is higher. What it reminds you of is: be even smaller, even more in batches — not to pile in more while it's hot.
• When you yourself start wanting to "invest more this time." This is the signal to watch most, and it comes from inside you, not from the market. The moment you catch yourself wanting to break your set DCA discipline, wanting to "go all in," stop — that's usually emotion using DCA's name to make you go heavy.

On what state people fall into when the market overheats, I go into more detail in In a bull run, which signals should make you start trimming. But remember that piece's premise is the same as here: watching signals is to control your own emotions, not to escape the top precisely.

The fear phase of a bear market is often a better time to sow

The counterpart to "don't get carried away in a bull run" is another counterintuitive line: the buys people are later most grateful for usually happen in the most uncomfortable bear market, when nobody wants to buy.

The reasoning isn't complicated. The harder the price falls, the more the news talks it down, and the more people around you say "don't touch it," the more it usually means market sentiment has hit a low — and cheap chips tend to be around at exactly these times. But I have to add two honest caveats, or this becomes a buy call: one, nobody knows where the bottom is in a bear market, the low you think you see may have a lower one beneath it, so still buy in batches and don't dump it all in at once; two, still use only money you can afford to lose, because a bear market can be long and you have to be able to endure it.

So this section isn't telling you to "buy the dip" — buying the dip is back to timing. What it means is: when everyone's afraid and you, too, badly want to sell, if you can still keep buying small amounts on your original plan, that "not interrupted by fear" persistence is, over the long run, often worth more than any precise timing call. This is exactly where DCA shows its value most in a bear market.

Recap: the best time is the day you've thought it through

To wrap up. If you ask me "what exactly is the best time to buy bitcoin," my answer isn't a price or a month — it's: the day you've figured out how much you can afford to lose and are sure you can keep going is your best time.

Because by that day, you no longer need to gamble on timing. With money you can afford to lose, in batches, held long-term, you've quietly swapped "when to buy" — a question ordinary people can't win — for "can I keep myself in check," a question you can genuinely control. That's the whole point of anti-timing: not finding that perfect point, but making that point no longer matter. As for what exactly this money should buy and how to make your first purchase, that's for later.