If dollar cost averaging is your goal, I think that setting up an automatic monthly transfer of a fixed amount (or percentage amount) from a cash account to a stock fund would work better. With a stock fund, you never know how much the dividends will be, and, sometimes, when they will come. And, they are not always based on the total value of the fund.

Should you Reinvest gains in a taxable acct? It depends! Do you need the money to live on? If you do, don’t reinvest, if you don’t need the money, then reinvest. Pretty simple. I invest in quality index funds and I would rather keep the base shares so I don’t have to sell any of them to live on so I think it’s better to live off the dividends and keep the base intact.
A couple of clarifications: you want to keep your emotions out of your investment strategy. I know too many people (me included in the early years) that hold a stock/fund way too long and lose money, mainly because they are emotionally tied to a stock/fund. Put trailing stop losses on your shares so if something happens like a % downturn or other criteria, you sell without knowing. It’s easy to buy, it’s harder to sell, especially something that has made you good money in the past.
As for knowing what your dividends will be, price and date, it is posted by the fund or stock way before it happens. I can calculate what the dividend will be on the specific date, you need to know this for tax purposes every year.

I have Vanguard and Fidelity stock mutual funds, and I don't reinvest any of the dividends or capital gain distributions, so I don't really care when they are paid. But, I have never received any advanced notification of when or how much these payouts will be. They just seem to show up after the fact. I do check my account at the end of the month to see how much was deposited into my cash reserve account. Am I missing something? Where is this information posted in advance of the payout?

Easy, have you ever looked at the stock/fund specs? There is a section called distributions and yields. It tells you the dividend yield, ex-date and previous pay date. So if it’s paid every qtr, add 3 months to the pay date.
Some of my stuff is paid the last few days of December each year but most are paid quarterly. MM yields are a little different.
You can also go to your last quarterly statement and see what you got that qtr and what you have made ytd.

They show a 30-day yield, so I could estimate the future quarterly dividend. But, I wouldn't know how to calculate the December capital gains distribution amount. They sure don't tell me what it is going to be in advance.

December is like any other qtr end, you will know exactly when it gets paid out by the pay date.
The easiest way is to look at your quarterly statement for your account and see what was paid for that qtr

I had a financial professor in college that said almost the same thing, "Never Invest Beyond the Sleeping Point", if you can't sleep at night, then you have too much invested.

It’s dollar cost averaging and yes, you reinvest your gains and you can be buying shares at their lowest price or at their highest price, or somewhere in between. When I was working and couldn’t spend more time playing with my portfolios, I would buy and hold. Now retired, I’m much more hands on. If I owned any of the top 7 high tech stocks, I would not be reinvesting my gains because it would buy much less since they are at their highest value, I would take these gains and buy shares in companies that were hit hard last year that still have room to grow.
When we all worked and contributed to our 401k plans each month, that was dollar cost averaging and we didn’t need the money plus we had time on our hands for the market to recover, which is old folks don’t have much anymore.

IMO, if you don’t invest into the market you should be more worried and lose more sleep not knowing if you will outlive your investments. This doesn’t mean you have to buy funds/stocks, it could be ultra safe money market funds at close to 5% yields.

If you want to make good money in the stock market just buy what I sell and sell what I buy...;-(

Not exactly my goal but if you are going to be a consistent long term investor (which I generally am) best to not try and time the market but to keep investing. Do not always do this by equal amounts but dollar cost average is an efficient way to invest as a long term investor

Fyi
 

Villages Investment Education Club, tomorrow, Thursday, 6/22, at Sea Breeze, 3:00 PM.

This time it will be a dividends discussion.

Boomer