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I'm happy your strategy is working out for you.
For sure, each of us has to attempt to account for our own situation in terms of cashflow, other investments, view of bitcoin as compared with other investments, timeline, risk tolerance and time, skills and abilities to learn plan strategize and tweak from time to time based on learning including possibly reallocating and trading.
How long you have been in bitcoin (including establishing your position) can also affect how long you have been able to solidify your position and your strategies.
So, if we go buy your forum registration date of June 2019, it could be quite possible that you have not had as much time as me to establish your position, and also since I had already been investing in a variety of other assets for about 25 years prior to my late 2013 entrance into BTC, I was relatively shortly (within about a year) able to get a pretty decent stake in bitcoin - even though, like I said I was somewhat anxious and nervous about whatever I was doing for about 3 years after getting started in part because my BTC portfolio continued to be either unprofitable or ONLY marginally becoming profitable by the end of that 3 years.. but then it moved quite far into profitability soon thereafter as we might surmise from the BTC price movements of late 2016 and most of 2017.
So degree of profitability (that may well be tied to how long you are in and attempting to employ your strategy) can also bring some changes in comfort but also some changes in the strategies (or at least more conviction in terms of strategies already being followed - not suggesting that I am opposed to ongoing tweakenings of strategies, if seems to be a prudent course of action).
My trading strategy is somewhat different. I prefer to stay mostly in BTC.
Of course, each of us is going to employ strategies that are a bit different from each other, even if we share a lot of similar factors.
There might be some need for explanation, here. When I came into bitcoin I ended up targeting putting 10% of my quasi-liquid investment asset value into BTC, but by the time all was said and done after a couple of years, the amount that I ended up putting into bitcoin was in the ballpark of 13.5%..,. so if that allocation was more or less achieved by the end of 2015 or so (even though most of it was achieved in 2014), then BTC's price appreciation had caused my BTC allocation to go towards the 90% arena by the end of 2017 but then bounce back down to somewhere around 50% during the extremes of the 2018 and 2020 corrections, but then gotten into the 90% arena, again, and yes, if I end up extracting out some of the dollars that are in my various bitcoin related funds in order to figure out what is actually in BTC versus non-BTC... then maybe I get somewhere below 90% - even though those funds (even if in dollars) are largely dedicated towards bitcoin at this point.
I would claim that I am sufficiently "in" bitcoin, and sufficiently staying in bitcoin in spite of tinkering arounds on the various edges, even if some might say that my allocation into bitcoin is not enough because I am not 100% in bitcoin, and I find those ideas to be quite bullshit both in the times that we live and also in terms of some of the necessities for most people to keep some other assets besides bitcoin including being able to account for their various short to medium and even somewhat longer term fiat expenses.
In fact I already asserted several times, that since late 2013 my non-BTC investments have been enough to sustain my standard of living, and sure I have made some little bumpenings up in my standard of living in some regards in accounting for my bitcoin value that I have as insurance, but my bumping up has not been drawing into my bitcoin investment except maybe indirectly I have been trying to keep less and less fiat reserves in the traditional systems as an account for the ongoing increasing value of my BTC investment and the securities/assurances that the BTC value has been providing - moreso after 2016.
I only keep a small amount of my total stash on any exchange.
I did a quickie look, and it appears that I have about 10% to 11% of my total BTC investment value on various exchanges (and with 3rd parties). I believe before early 2017, I had around 50% to 60% on about 10 exchanges (or with 3rd parties). I don't consider 10% to 11% to be a significant portion of my overall value, and I consider the utility (and benefits) of it to be worth the risk (including that on a personal level, I have wanted to have some various kinds of participation in the BTC eco-structure besides mere HODLing – which I consider that if I participate in various aspects of bitcoin, it causes me to more actively attempt to watch what is going on while attempting to learn from my participation, too).
Lately, I have been selling just enough to cover my monthly expenses.
Just from that representation, you are describing your situation as quite different from mine, especially that I have tended to be reluctant to actually outrightly sell my BTC stash in order to take care of any regular expenses, and only on some lesser frequent occasions have I sold BTC and ending up having some troubles replacing it or somehow attempting to plug those sold values back into my system – which might be removing buy orders from the very bottom of my ladder of buy orders and putting them higher up.. such as putting them as the next buys to make (which means closing my buy/sell gap or attempting to buy BTC in order to keep my BTC stash close to the same as it was prior to the sale).
In 2014, 2015 and 2016, I was even more paranoid about the buy and replace and I would set up systems to more surely guarantee that I had buy backs in a relatively short period of time, frequently less than a couple of days. After 2017, I felt that my BTC portfolio was getting into quite significant profits, so I did not mind so much if there might be some extra shavings off here and there but still not using BTC for any kinds of regular expenses because I have fiat cashflows (mostly passive, since 2013) that are already designated for ongoing and regular expenses – and usually projecting out around 18 to 24 months.
By the way, I do understand that if someone is either earning money in BTC or mining or something like that, then they have to have a system that regularly cashes out BTC, so even though peeps in those kinds of situations might end up keeping more of their value in BTC, I still would consider it quite problematic if they are not reasonably projecting out their cashflows for a considerable amount of time – maybe they might not need to go as far as 18-24 months like I do, but they should be attempting to minimize some kind of scenario where they might be forced to sell decent or significant portions of their BTC that is at a time that is NOT of their own choosing, merely because they managed and projected their cashflows poorly – and that did kind of happen to me in November 2018 – not a major loss but a bit of a lesson (and not even sure if I completely learned from it.. even though I think about it frequently).
By doing so, I try to sell at the local monthly high, and if I have any fiat left, I try to rebuy if it dips.
That seems like a really crazy-ass way of managing cashflow – month to month. I feel that I am very conservative, and I starting to think more and more that there is a lot of importance in having a conservative mindset when it comes to how to deal with capital, and yeah it took me a fuck tone of time to build wealth over 25 years before getting into bitcoin, but still I was never really a BIG risk taker and I have just honed those practices over the years.. and don’t call me a fud dud because I do take some risks, but taking too many risks can become quite problematic if you lose your principle and you have to start over again.. but you can still put some of your principle at risk without putting it too much at risk and allowing it to work for you…
When I was 18 to 25,…. - might have even lasted longer than that. I frequently would project my cashflow out at least 6 months – but I think that I was having some troubles using debt during that time and sometimes it was just harder, back then to actually qualify for getting credit lines that became easier and easier as I got older (but I think that times changed somewhat too with more loose credit line policies)… but anyhow, the more complicated my finances (including using debts and having some varying risks and volatilities in investments – and even cashflow), I found it more and more advantageous to project cashflows out further.. and gosh I would get nervous when it appeared that one or two or even three months in advance were appearing to have potential short-falls.. there is almost no way that I would want to have uncertainty within the same month.. but maybe that is just me, even though I do find a lot of wealth creation potential in having really good grasps on longer term cashflows including even sometimes assigning probabilities to certain streams of income or expenses coming due/arriving at certain timelines.
This time I can happily admit that I was wrong, I didn't expect us to drop below $60k.
Of course, you probably realize that I never have much confidence in short term price direction beyond 5% or so, therefore I am frequently around 50/50 for anything, and there is a considerable amount of emotional detachment from that.. if you see me stating probabilities of 55% / 45% that is meaning that I am becoming confident (or potentially deluded) about one direction over another..
And, yeah of course, there are not just two price directions because we have sideways too, and then price is not ONLY a function of amount but also a function of time, so getting the time and the amount correct seems like a fools errand to me, and accordingly, I find it quite prudent to prepare for either direction and maybe tweaking a bit to bias towards one direction or another, and I suppose that my long term tweaking bias has continued to be tweaking towards Uppity… which sometimes even that sometimes has gotten me into trouble in terms of starting to run low on cash if the BTC price runs against my preparations for what seems to be for too long of a time.
When/if the price starts going parabolic on the log scale, I will most likely revisit my trading strategy.
Good to revisit it from time to time, for sure… and sometimes the time to revisit it might be when there is a BIG market movement or even a series of regular or normal market movements in the same direction that largely add up to BIG in the whole scheme of things.
Sometimes when I go to reset some of my buy orders or sell orders, I decide to revisit the whole thing just to reassess my level of comfort.
I have a fairly BIG deal that I am contemplating that is fairly short-term that will likely cause me to have to do some tweaking in the short term, and then I have an even BIGGER long term project that is in my head, and likely is going to take way the hell more planning/structuring that I will need to get to at some point when the mere regular day activities might open up some space to permit me to do so.
On the other part, I agree with you that we haven't seen the top yet. I wouldn't be surprised if the price is going sideways or even going down in the short term, before taking off to new heights later this year. We have had 6 monthly candles in the green. Going up forever without any monthly red candle seems unlikely.
There are so many damned bullish things going on in Bitcoinlandia (of course I worry about some of the froth in the shitcoin space), and it almost seems way too good to be true, and sad for the peeps who are likely missing out on this whole matter (likely a lot of retail normies), so yeah, I believe that there are great odds for decent levels of UPpity in the coming months that could last as long as 20 months…. but we also have no guarantees that the top of $64,895 for this cycle might already be in.. (seems like a decently low probability that the top is in but surely quite a bit greater than a zero probability, and maybe even in a 10% or greater arena that the top is in… am I being too bullish with this 10% number?)
Whatever, if you are not preparing for both UP and Down – and sure sideways is in there too, somewhere (less likely), then you are likely gambling rather than investing… preparations for both UP and DOWN are based on a number of factors including assigning probabilities and should be both financially and psychologically.
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