Is buy-the-dip a real strategy or just a meme?

It's a real, testable strategy once you define 'dip.' Formalized as 'buy when the asset is 10% below its 20-day high, exit at +8% profit,' it becomes measurable — and the measurements are instructive. On volatile, upward-drifting assets (leveraged index ETFs especially), dips have historically recovered often enough to make the pattern work; on assets that trend down or sideways, 'the dip' keeps dipping and the strategy holds losers indefinitely, since the naive version has no stop. The meme version fails on asset selection, not entry logic. Our per-ETF backtest pages show the same dip rules producing excellent results on some tickers and ugly ones on others — which is the real lesson.