I respect your theory of dollar cost averaging and "investing" over time and all that stuff and would say that is quite a safe strategy, but your style/theory doesn't apply to everyone..
I understand that I might be coming off as a bit dogmatic, yet I understand that each person has to find their own level of balance and figure out what strategy or combination of strategies work for them.
Dollar cost averaging is a method that is proven to be very effective with almost any asset, and tends to be especially superior to any attempts to time the market as long as in the long run the price of the asset tends towards up.. or at least it goes up sufficiently at some point in time that anyone buying into such asset is able to cash out in profits at some point in time in the future.
Dollar cost averaging is especially good for anyone in an accumulation phase of their investment. So, let's say that your goal is to accumulate enough BTC in order that your BTC reflects 10% of the total value of all of your investible assets, and you want to reach that goal within a year. Accordingly, you would budget for that year. Also if you are still building your whole investment portfolio, you would also figure out how to allocate your investment budget for all of the assets that you have in your portfolio.
Trading is also NOT a way to accumulate BTC or wealth.
trading should not be a means to accumulate BTC
Trading is also NOT a way to accumulate BTC or wealth.
trading should not be a means to accumulate BTC
you should not be planning on building your BTC wealth based on trading
This is a good thing to tell newbs but I don't consider it true for me at all..
If you consider yourself to be good at trading, then surely you could try to trade instead of dollar cost averaging, but dollar cost averaging tends to out perform trading. Once you get to a certain level of accumulation, then maybe at that point you could establish a trading budget.
Of course, you want to be a trader, so that is what you want to do.. not going to be able to stop you... and I don't want to stop you from doing what you want to do..
I have only ever bought $100 worth of BTC in my life!!! In 12/2017 at the same time I sold about .8 BTC for $$.. Thinking about buying some back..
I have NOT "bought in" to BTC/Crypto EVER.. Ever ever..
I am NOT sure if you should be proud of NOT buying. What you do depends on your cashflow, so if you get a cashflow in dollars or some form of fiat, then the most logical way to acquire bitcoin would be through buying it. Of course you can perform services, but it would not make any sense for some people to NOT buy it.
Of course, if you are in some kind of business in which you earn BTC or mine it, and if that starts to constitute a large portion of your income, then you have to sell BTC in order to pay some bills. Ultimately, there is going to be some kind of balance in terms of how to consider your investment and your investing style.
When I got into BTC in late 2013, and I accumulated BTC for a bit over 1 year to acquire my initial BTC stake, and then the next 1-2 years, I was still injecting some money into BTC, but more in a kind of maintenance mode. My income was mostly in fiat and dollars, and when I was transitioning into BTC, I was largely reallocating about 10% of my investment portfolio into BTC, which took about a year to accomplish and that was by going through dollars first.
So, yeah, it is up to you to consider if you believe that it is a good thing to choose NOT to buy BTC, especially if you may only need to acquire enough BTC that would constitute a few hundred thousand dollars in order to feel that it is covering your investment accumulation goals.
In 2014 I got 0.01BTC for FREE from a friend sent to my Cryptsy account.. That's all.. Just 0.01BTC worth around $5..
Between then and the time Cryptsy crashed I traded that 0.01 BTC into over 2 BTC.. Trading ONLY.. Thousands of trades bro.. I wish that never would have ended..
I sold a decent chunk of that for car parts like an idiot @ <$500/BTC.. So stupid..
O.k... if you believe that you can replicate your trading profits, then you should not need very much BTC in order to reach your few hundred thousand dollars of value...
A problem remains about whether history is replicable.. and that is up to you to determine, and hopefully you do not have too high of expectations out of your own abilities. That is on you, because I could give less than two shits if you happen to be a wonderful trader because I am personally NOT going to do it, and I would rather be doing other things with my time.
Traded Polo mainly for a while after that.. Handle there was "SatSnatcher".. Scalping satoshis.. Always scalping satoshis..
Went into arbing altcoin exchanges for a while.. Made meager profits..
Then I made some nice profits TRADING XCP assets, lol..
Think I did about 400% gain on what I put into Huobi...
Dude I have probably LOST on 2,000+ trades easy across many many exchanges, but won more that I lost with a good risk/reward ratio..
That's on you... if you consider yourself to be a good trader, then do it... The vast majority of people do not do great with that kind of stuff, and like I said, I only do swing trading, so I don't consider myself to be a trader, even though once in a while I will take advantage of some obvious profit that might be staring me in the face, but I largely do not play around with that shit. Not my style.
99% of ALL crypto I have ever owned has ALL been made trading exchanges.. ALL OF IT!! I've never bought anything..
Great... Not stopping you, especially if you happen to be one of the few who are profitable with it.
I got into crypto TO TRADE.. I didn't know shit about crypto, didn't know shit about trading either, but
I wanted to try trading, and I fell in love with Bitcoin..
You don't have to believe me but I'm telling you that that is the god's honest truth..
Check the date of this post I made..
I started with .01 BTC and made over 14,000% profit my first season (winter) trading.. Thousands of trades..
One of my first few posts on Bitcointalk..
And when I said that I meant that I increased my
BTC stash by 14,000%, not $$ or anything else..
I have always only traded to increase my BTC stash no matter what, no mater what that meant in $..
So if you start with 1 BTC, then you should have 140BTC... great. Hard to beat that.
I think that I have fewer BTC than I bought... and my BTC profits are less than 15x up... and that is measured in the dollar investment... even though I feel rich.. .but hey.. whatever, if you can make BTC through trading, then you should not need to limit yourself to a few hundred thousand in terms of a goal of being financially set.
You can say all you want that "Trading is NOT a way to accumulate BTC" but that just is not correct 100% of the time..
It is sufficiently enough true to say it quite emphatically... and dollar cost averaging tends to be the way better path forward for the vast majority of normies.
If you happen to be someone who has found a niche in trading, then go do it to your hearts desire. That is on you.. I am not going to stop telling people to accumulate a stash first and to NOT trade until they have a foundational stash. Lot's of people lose their principle and they are not able to get it back because they engage in gambling behaviors, so if you or anyone else is smart enough to figure out systems to preserve your principle and to be able to profit from trading, then it is all good on you to employ such system to your benefit.
Trading has been MY way of accumulating BTC and I am proof otherwise..
well do it then.
I have never made much of shit lending here or with signatures or anything.. Anything I have made on Bitcointalk is very insignificant.. I haven't been paid for a signature here in YEARS..
Some people make some bitcoin through that method.
"Investing" $20 a week into BTC seems silly to me WHEN I SHOULD BE TRADING..
I used $20 as an example. The amount that you buy with dollar cost averaging depends on your budget, and if you otherwise have your shit together in terms of your budget.
Probably, I misunderstood some of your goals since you said something about having had spent 1.6BTC and that you had a bit more than 1.6BTC and that you had acquired most of your BTC at $500-ish.., so I thought that you had been in BTC for a few years and therefore, maybe you had a tight budget that was causing you troubles in the rate in which you were able to acquire BTC.
I cannot really determine if you are shifting the goals in this subsequent post, but in the end, it is up to you to figure out what are your own goals, and your budget, and sure, if you believe that your time is effectively spent on trading BTC.... and of course, you are coming off as hostile to dollar cost averaging, even though dollar cost averaging has proven to be a very solid method, especially for NON-traders... which you have clearly proclaimed yourself NOT to be... hahahahaha
From your earlier post, it had sounded to me that you did not want to trade BTC and that you had not done well in your prior trading of BTC, and now all of a sudden you seem to have shifted your emphasis and are now proclaiming to be a quasi-god of an expert trader. So I may have misunderstood your earlier description.
I am not very risk-adverse..
I have been poor, I have been homeless in a shelter, I have been to jail, I have lost everything, I've been there..
I suppose that you have to find a style that suits your perception of your personality and what you want to continue to be. I was a lot more risk-taking in my youth, but not as much with my finances... To me, I recognize that it is very difficult to rebuild your portfolio if you lose it, and surely a lot of people end up putting themselves into really fucked up situations in their older years because they did not know how to be conservative with preservation of their wealth.
Of course, you can be more risk taking when you hardly have any wealth, but if you are trading hundreds of bitcoins and that is all that you have to your name, you might want to consider stashing some of those away so that you have a working capital that you trade with and another portion that is stocked away.. but whatever that is up to you.
I am sure that you have heard about the martingale method. It is a method that is statistically shown to be a loser, but a lot of gamblers use such method and walk away at opportune times, buy if you are playing with your whole stash, at some point, you may end up running yourself into an inability to keep doubling down, and you end up being homeless for the rest of your life and without any kind of capital... but again the extent that you employ wealth preservation as an important system is up to you and sometimes is only really appreciated when you actually have a lot of wealth that you are able to preserve.
I did all kinds of crazy shit when I was in my teens and even when I was in my 20s and 30s... but sometimes, your luck can run out or you can be in some pretty deep shit if you do not start building at some point. I personally feel so lucky in life, especially when I see some of the people at my same age, but yeah, each of us are going to appreciate different things including figuring out how liquid we want our wealth to be or how tied down that we want to be to any geography or job... and surely nice to have options and an income and even NOT having to work, if we don't want to work... work as optional is much more empowering than halving to either work or to be having to really restrict yourself in your old age because you don't have enough income coming in because you failed to prepare yourself adequately.
I look back on it now as a fun and adventurous time of my life.. It taught me that I can do almost anything.. I can bicycle through a city in a blizzard.. I can hike miles.. I'm confident that I could be dropped off in any city in America with absolutely nothing and figure out how to make it work..
I can hardly believe what all I can do if I just decide to do it.. I can come back from anything..
You going to be able to do that when you are 50? Do you want to have to do that when you are 50? What if you are injured in some kind of way, which happens to some people by the time that they reach 50, and they did not plan it that way, but they are not able to run a marathon or fight in gladiators as they were able to do when they were 40.... even chicks are going to expect them to have money by the time they are 50 otherwise they won't even be able to bang chicks... Go figure.
I have also worked some of the most demanding jobs imaginable.. I can go work 100 hours a week across the country if I want to, on remote well locations, and bank.. I've worked in the Detroit ghetto where few dare to go, and you eat lunch at bulletproof Taco Bells that have obviously been shot up a time or 2, shots all still in the glass.. I'm not scared to do it again if I need to, but I don't like to spend my life that way..
Just another excellent adventure, but it gets unpleasant after a while..
Of course, many of us have stories that we can tell about certain kinds of things that we have done, and yeah, if you have lived through it, then you also want to be able to have an income in order that you don't have to do those kinds of things in your old age.
That is a good thing that you are able to live without a lot of expenses, and likely means that it should be easier to reach your goal.
I am a very self-reliant person.. What most people spend money on I do myself..
I can work on/fix almost F'n anything.. I'm a bit of a collector of tools..
I also don't waste my money buying trash..
I only like to buy things that last forever, are useful, and hold value, as much as possible.. I like classic/vintage stuff over modern junk anyway so it works well..
O.k.... maybe we agree on some of these matters to be important. I was just using the ability to live within your means as examples to be able to have enough of a budget to be able to stock away some of your income on a regular basis and to build wealth.
It seems to me to be better to live frugally when young and be able to splurge when older, if you want.. but you only get to the ability to be able to splurge when you are older if you have enough of a nest egg in order to be able to do it. So, yeah, if you come from wealth, you might not have to worry, but it sounds like you are similar to me, at least in terms of that you did not come from wealth.. so in that regard, you have to build your own wealth.
ideology should not be your central motivator
Some things are more important than money..
When I was young, I did a lot of things in which I was not really focused on making a lot of money. I was ideological, and I was even that way in my work... however, I always would stock money away, usually at least 10% of my income, and sometimes there was variance, so I am glad that everything has really worked out well for me in terms of money and maybe there has been some luck in that regard. Money does give you options.. that's for sure... and sure, it is not the most important thing... but good NOT to have to worry about it, if possible..
As far as Debt..
I have plenty of assets other than Bitcoin that could easy be sold to pay off all of my debt..
I could sell less than half my cars alone and be debt free.. I don't owe a cent on my property and it is worth many times what my "debts" are, or cars..
I could go work like a slave for a couple months and pay it..
No big deal..
Well, there is nothing wrong with balancing some debt, and I think that I already made my points, in that regard, but if you are not really accumulating Bitcoin, then that is on you... at least you know about bitcoin, so you are way the fuck further than a lot of people, but even if you know about bitcoin but you do not act to accumulate bitcoin, then it is not going to do you a lot of good to have known about bitcoin before some of the no coiners and precoiners.
I personally think that it s a good idea to figure out ways to accumulate bitcoin, and surely DCA is an easy ass way to do it.. but apparently you do not want to do that. And through the link that I provided I already showed you what $20 per week would have done over 4 years. You can increase that amount and see how powerful DCA is.. and of course, you can trade too, if that is how you want to spend time, but you did not seem like you wanted to trade, but now, you are an expert trader, so maybe that could be an option that works for you to figure out how to accumulate BTC over the coming years so when you get into your 50s you have a kind of fuck you status rather than having to be in the ratt race.. It's up to you ... It's up to you, and you surely know your particulars way better than anyone else, including yours truly.
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