I started investing in crypto at all time high (ATH) 2017. Bitcoin seemed to have climbed up from 6000 to 17000. I looked at the graph and thought it could only keep rising. n00b lol. Right after i bought, it started going downhill. And then a while later, it went downhill again. And again. Till it hit 3500 in January 2019. I looked around before investing and found that some small coins did 40x during that short bullrun. Of course, you have to sell in time, because in 2017 it was a matter of days between the rise and drop again.
So in Dec 2017 bitcoin did x2.5, while some small coins did x40.
That was my observation and thinking of how much profit i wanted with my not-so huge savings my strategy was: don’t but BTC, but buy smaller coins. Everything from LTC to Raven. I followed the coins on Discord. I did lose Raven at some point because it seemed no one was actually working on it. I sold and bought and sold.. I think I lost a lot of money that way. THere is a way of making money with trading if you follow a certain coin and you know its movements and you also don’t care about losing it (when price goes up and you can’t buy again) because you aren’t emotionally attached to that coin.
I’m too stupid to read white papers and development programs so what I do is read the facebook comments in crypto groups and see what everyone is saying. You can say it’s stupid, but it gives me a lot of feeling of where things are going. And everyone = the people investing in crypto eventually. Except for the big whales of course who own millions and can manipulate the market price by selling big quantities.
I think the MOST IMPORTANT lesson after these 3 yrs is that PRICE OF TOP COINS WILL GO UP EVENTUALLY. If only you wait long enough.
Some other things:
- probably not smart to panic buy (FOMO) when it went up bigtime already. I know you think it went up that much, but you can still buy and make some profit on the way up.. Nah. Unless it goes up for weeks and everyone calls it a bullrun :p Very short-term green candles: don’t buy. It’s actually adviced to sell it when it went up vertically, because usually there will be a correction (overbuying and then the smarter people start selling because THEY know the downfall is coming) that follows so you can buy cheaper again.
- Keep your keys somewhere, and keep a copy of them somewhere else too (usb stick or so). Read on how to reinstall the Google authenticator in case you lose your phone. Best: keep a phone just for this and don’t take that one outdoors.
- Cryptopia (some smaller exchange) closed after a hack and I also lost some coins there and I won’t get them back: lesson learned. Put your coins in a trustworthy BIG exchange, and also: don’t leave them on an exchange unless you think you will be trading soon. Put them in an offline wallet.
- you only lose when you sell again at a lower price. And price will eventually go up. In three years maybe but it will go up. SEe main lesson.
- Bitcoin made more profit than any other coin this time. God knows what will happen next time. Some people say there might not even be a big fall again, but meh.. It’s been going up and downhill again for 10 yrs so why stop now ? I’m hoping for one more big drop so i can buy more. And then the net bullrun will be my retirement plan. Of course it can be a disappointment but I’m sure I learned a few things so next time I will more than just double my investment.
- stop selling coins that had good future predicted by most people but that didn’t move for a while. Buy them and keep them, eventually they will go up in the bull runs.
- the small unknown coins can be lucky and go 40x. But yeah.. that’s just a lot of Maybes. Worth trying but don’t put all your money in one, like I did. Egem keeps on being ‘developed’ but it’s now the only coin going downhill in this long bullrun. I sold 2/3 of it, and now keep the rest because the price is simply too low, there is no one willing to give anything for it. And thus I keep it, hoping it might jump one day.
- selling a coin because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere usually results in a big pump right after :p Crypto is just a way of punishing yourself on a daily basis because you’re stupid and have no sense of timing lol.
- look into the extra cost of sending around coins from exchange to exchange. Litecoin is cheaper than BTC or ETH, for example. Or trading comes at a certain cost. Sometimes it’s a lot cheaper to create a new order than to answer an existing one.
If you are smart enough to learn to read the signals and to be a day trader, good for you. I’m more of an intuitive person and I just follow the feels. The feels often short-term fu*ked me over because i was greedy. I know now i have to just wait it out a few more years. Stop selling. Buy more when price goes down.
Ofcourse i bought now that BTC went into a 20 percent dip after new ATH of 50000 :p But like I said, the bullrun is going on for weeks this time. And if it goes downhill more, it will go back and higher in a while.