Bitcoin Forum

As mentioned in the subject line I am one of those whose life was changed after the bullish market at the end of 2017 but I did eventually lost a huge chunk because of greed. I lost huge amount of money just because I did not sell it off during the peak and wanted the value to cross $25,000 which eventually led to collapse in the market situation and I had to sell it off for a mere $5,000 after a long wait expecting market to recover. The mistake which I made was not selling it when the value declined after reaching the peak. Kindly share your experiences as well as it will help new folks.

It's really difficult to sell @ peak since, during that time, you will never see any significant sign of a crash. It's a surprise! However, being end up selling at $5,000 already depends on your hands. You already have enough time to think if you will sell or not but still, you continue to hodl. Well, not a wrong move though if you are one of the people that have a tagged line of "hodl to death" but if not, yes it's regrettable.


Honestly, not necessary. Crypto is volatile so they will experience being struck too between buying and selling.

Let them do their homework to analyze when is the right time to make an action.

the mistake you did was try to reach $ 25,000 gains from the easy way "wait until the price goes up to that level."
The market is volatile, so small gains on a daily/weekly basis may lead you to increase your capital from $ 5,000 to $ 25,000 without the need to wait for the price to rise to that level.

In other words, you want to make a profit without having a clear plan for the nature of the market and how to behave if the price falls, it is natural that you get greedy at any stage.

This could be a good example how HODL should not work,holding with the hope of price will increase next day,next week or next month is really not HODL,we should hold the coin until our goal price reaches whether it should be in a week or year or a decade HODL it until.

I think huge number of people in crypto world had experienced something similar. If it's not secret, can you tell us at how much you bought BTC? I wouldn't call as mistake that you didn't sold during peak. Selling at loss was mistake, it wasn't wise decision. Sometimes crypto requires lot of patience. HODL'ing can took few years to get profit. Seems that you invested into crypto without much knowledge about trading and just wanted to become rich quickly. This is not how everything works unfortunately.

I don't think it's a loss. Because I believe as long as you hold your position, like not selling it below the price of your buying price, it still not a loss because there are still many possibilities that we can achieve new all-time-highs. Like what you said which you are expecting the value of Bitcoin will cross to $25,000 but suddenly it collapsed.
Well, it's not only you for sure who experienced this, there are lot of them out there.

You know greed can't make you successful. That's what's happened to me also. Everything is pumping like crazy way back 2017. I earned for about over $20k and lost it in an instant. That's the problem in me, I didn't sell when I already got profit. I wait for another huge pump again and never happen. That's a lesson for me and to all of those who wants to get huge profit. Don't let greed eats you. It will change your life forever.

You made quite a number of mistakes.
- Greed
- Not knowing when to exit the market(you took too long to sell) - The period between 20K to 5K was a very long period of time, you could have sold at a good price ans still made some profit if you were to exit instinctively once the market had started crushing.
- Selling off at the deep - It was useless to sell off at 5K. You should have just held you position.
- Lack of Patience
- Using money that you can not afford to lose which later forced to sell off at 5k since you probably wanted to use it.
- Lack of plan, You did know when to take profit. When trading or HODLing bitcoin always know when to take profit. It isn't like you will be HODLing forever.

Trading is brutal.
Predictions are wrong most of the time, and bitcoin make many unexpected movements.
Unless you study TA a lot, I don't think it is worth.

On the other hand , bitcoin's price increase a lot this easier, from 3k to 13 at peak, and now at 8.
Holding is still one of the most safe and profitable strategies, like most good assets.

Just buy some every month to dolar average it. That's my strategy

I made the same mistake too but I'd stopped blaming myself eventually because it happened unexpectedly and I don't consider greed in putting faith in your investment that has a value to the community. Pehrpas it's just a lesson for us to be more aware to the market situation. Just because the market is going according to your technical analysis, it doesn't mean that it will go along that way. There will be a certain time wherein it wouldn't turn against you and you have to be prepared for that.

it seems to me that the mistake you made and the mistake that you still continue to make is thinking of bitcoin as tool to make you more "fiat" as profit and nothing else!

It's not really a loss per se but should rather be called not being able to take advantage of the market or misreading the market, therefore not being able to get the most out of it.
Its not really surprising since a lot of people were expecting BTC to rise more than 20k. Sadly, expectations were not met and many were instead disappointed and lost a lot of possible profit which they could have made.

Not selling at the peak is already a huge mistake, followed by even a worst mistake by selling it at $5,000. I can't believe you've missed two major opportunities in just one scenario.
Care to share why you sold it at $5,000 mark?
Maybe because you lost faith in Bitcoin? Thinking it will gradually die and was just covering the possibility of further loss?

@Wysi while I can understand you were unable to sell when Bitcoin prices were at an all time high, I’m unable to understand why did you sell it for $5k. If only you could have hodl your coins till 2019, then you would have been able to sell it for $13k. I feel we all can learn an important lesson from this, that is not to let our greed over power our decision making skills.

I can’t make out if the loss you mention is real of virtual. By real I mean that you bought at a high price and sold for 5K. That is a tangible loss. On the other hand, by virtual loss I’m referring to a loss of opportunity for having missed out on selling at peak (not that it was easy to foresee how it would go at the time), not incurring in real heavy losses, but rather creating one of those "if only I had …" pins jagged hard into the memory.

Of course I’m aware. What I meant is that the effective loss depends on where you are coming from (i.e if you bought back say in April 2017, the price was just over 1K). The purchase price is not clear, and therefore I cannot discern if the loss is effective or a loss of opportunity.

I hope you are well aware of market situation last year as we was once speculated to cross $25,000 and that's the reason I had decided to sell it off when it crosses the mark of $25,000 and by the month of April 2018 the market was not as good as it was and I still waited till April 2019 and had to sell it off ot avoid further loss which turned to be a fatal mistake, actually the situation was like that as the value was between $3,500 to $4,000 for a while before April 2019 and finally in April 2019 I had to sell it off.

When one of the great investors was asked for the secret of his success, he replied "Selling too soon".

I also almost lost 70% of my assets because of my lust for profit when it was already profit but I held it to make my profit higher, but the chart said differently, the altcoin I bought was a bad dump so my assets were minus about 70% and at that time I didn't install stop loss, my advice for those of you who want to trade, if it's already profitable then sell immediately so it doesn't dump back.

yeah this is the experiences price. you can never buy it without loss ;D and any newcomer not listen this warnings because this crypto market not seems to any other financial market in terms of volatility, peaks, spikes

I didn't experience any huge losses but I believe that with the right tools we can avoid such losses.

I also faced this.My all coin was worth 50k$+ in January 2018.after dumped my balance was around 24k$+.sold my few coins around 18k$ and in my country one people  scammed me 4.5k$ (local people ).after that i bought few coins and holding it.and trying to do daily trading.But I have no regret at all. actually I want to earn and trade.But in 2017-18 so many people faced this problem. 

there's nothing new about that. just a scenario that often happens in the market, many experienced the same even in different market than crypto

Till now I haven't experienced any big loss. I always try to hold more and sell when the market is peak so that at least I can get a little bit of profit. I think if we will make the right investment decession then we will not get any loss.

you are not one here,  who waited too long to bitcoin to come back to 20k
then you tired of waiting and sold everything in a desperation move.
and after your sale within few month/weeks bitcoins back to 13k
damn!
no advises here. cause every decision were made because of circumstance, all I can say hope you will recover from this.

Many experienced the same thing including me, the decline in assets was quite sharp and because of thought it could go up in the near future, and also the impatience of seeing a price that didn't go up made me choose to sell cheap, but luckily only 30% of my assets from bought, the rest is from bounty and saving from campaign rewards.

We all seem to experience this I'm new bought some coins early this year, kept wishing for higher price to sell which never happened yet I hold but I've lost huge sum already.