Jay, you indicated somewhere earlier that not everybody loses money with margin. I said that it is insane to take margin-account loan terms "for almost any purpose". I did not fit into that tiny little "almost"!
For sure, I am not referring to balls to the walls employment of margin when I am suggesting that there are ways to structure margin and use it to help you to prepare for price moves in either direction.
I don't use those kinds of techniques myself - even though I have used various kinds of debt to buy BTC... ..
You could imagine that if someone has 1 BTC that he bought at $40k.. To protect himself for the downside, he might enter a short of 0.05 BTC which would be 1/20th of the value of his holdings.. So if the BTC price goes up to $42k he loses the 0.05 BTC but his remaining 1 BTC goes up in value an equivalent amount so he ends up breaking even in dollar value, but if the BTC price goes down to $36k or lower, he could end up cashing in and making decent money on the .05 BTC that he used to short even though his 1BTC goes down in value.. that is what I mean by ways to structure in order to use the margin to prepare for either price direction, even though I may have gotten some of the details wrong since shorting BTC and even using margin is not part of something that I actually do.
You make less money when you hedge with margin, but you are better prepared for either price direction if that is what you are wanting to do.
You do not have to use margin to also prepare yourself for either price direction by selling small amounts on the way up and buying on the way down.. but for sure, I am not suggesting to sell large amounts.. you sell something less than 1% for every 10% the BTC price goes up and you also only sell from your BTC profits... and you are also prepared to accept not buying back if the BTC price never comes back down.. so in that regard, it would help your situation to only engage in such practice if you are already overinvested into BTC and decently already in profits when you are regularly selling on the way up.
For someone who did something terrifically stupid to get into this mess, I think I am actually not so stupid. After all, as I pleaded before, I was temporarily insane, not stupid.
You are likely not stupid, even though we might question if there is much of a difference between being stupid and insane or even unable to control your emotions...
In any event, you seem to have the ability to structure your systems in advance but you fail/refuse to do it.
I pretty much already described what you need to do in terms of an overall long term strategy.. but you don't want to do it.. so what else can anyone do? You can keep saying I almost struck it rich. I almost made up for all of my losses of my last several gambles. Maybe it does not even matter if you actually end up winning, because after you win you will just gamble it away on the next bet anyhow, no?
Jay's advice about DCA is sound for most people; indeed, I have passed it on to others before. However, it does not fit my unusual circumstances. In those circumstances, I was reasonably successful for the past few years until the moment that I took debt against BTC.
Don't use debt then. DCA is a good foundational approach as well as combining it with lump sum investing and buying on dips, but DCA remains the pillar around which those other strategies are built.. whether you might be front loading your DCA or tweaking it up or down fro time to time in order to attempt to prepare for buying on dips..or letting off on buying when BTC prices rise.. and of course, way more options come available to you when your portfolio grows much larger and you get into significant profits... which surely could take a lot of time, even quite a bit more than the 4 years that you say that you have been into BTC.. I have been in more than twice as long and surely each cycle feels better, but at the same time, we all make mistakes along the way too that will take away from some of our abilities to feel 100% confident.. but surely higher levels of confidence do seem like they come and surely if you have spent a decent amount of time building your portfolio, there should also be some reservations to gamble away large amounts of it too.. so there may well be a tendency for guys (and gal) who have built relatively large amounts of value to stay away from very much gambling or playing around and even 10% of your portfolio will seem like too much to be fucking around with.
So the longer that you are in, the more likely that you should be in profits.. especially with such a great asset like BTC and it is too bad, death_wish, that you are playing around so much that you are converting an almost inevitable winner into a loser.
Jay, this experience with margin has ruined years of my patient effort. I had financial success - not riches, nowhere near real riches, but "this is finally beginning to look pretty good". Then, I rapidly ruined it with a few little errors in judgment. Even if I can salvage my remaining BTC, it may take me a long time to rebuild.
Well you are not likely to win or to fix your ways if you keep on playing around with playing with margin that might well convert an investment into a gamble.. which even if win many times, if you do not stack away your winnings, you may well end up losing all of your winnings on one bad results.. which seems to be a frequent story with gamblers.. they are winning and winning and winning and even to make up for earlier losses... but also at some point, you cannot make up for all the time that you could have been stacking with a more solid (but less exciting) formula for success.
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