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When seeing that "$20k doomsday graph" by ImThour I got a flashback from when price dropped to just over $9 (yes, no 'k'), and some people speculated that the rate would fall back to resistance at $2, this was fueled by the constant "Bitcoin is a ponzi" (have fun with your bubble) bullshit posted in this forum at the time. I just felt humble about the fact that no matter when you step into Bitcoin it will feel like a bad decision, as being late to the party.
Ok. that was a couple of years before my time, yet I understand the gravity of that particular situation because the spike up from below $1 to $32 and then getting stuck below $2 for a while has been deemed as one of the greatest BTC price corrections ever.. and sure maybe it is just a matter of comparing similar periods, and then suffering shell shock from them. One thing about the passage of time is that it seems that it becomes more and more difficult to achieve such short-term extremes, even if they continue to happen...
In 2016/2017, there were so many BTC holders who had still been shell-shocked from 2014/2015 and even having had been stuck in the mid-$200s for 10 months or so.. and so in that regard, the feeling that the price could dip at any time and then get stuck 50% below the previous price, and yeah, we have had instances of those outrageous price drops (and getting stuck) after 2015 - but they did not seem to last as long, overall... even though every one of those price drops of 50% (we had 2 of those since April 2021) caused us to speculate that we could end up experiencing another 50% drop.. which surely would not be out of the cards nor out of reasonable possibilities of something that could happen.
For sure, I have frequently asserted that the longer that any of us is in bitcoin, the more likely that we should be able to build some kinds of financial and psychological prowess... or at least buffers that should cause us to feel that we are more prepared for either BTC price direction. I do know that I cannot presume the circumstances of others because we may well have aspirations to build, but then we end up still making mistakes along the way to cause us to feel financially/psychologically vulnerable.
I am not even saying that all of us are going to be successful to build systems that cause us to sufficiently remove our tendencies to gamble, to feel emotions and even to get greedy in terms of thinking that we know more than we do about BTC price direction for example (and then end up being wrong).
I am not going to completely give up in regards towards preaching that guys need to continuously try to prepare for both price directions and even engage in some preparations that consider the various extremes.. but still there is a need to assign an appropriate amount of weight.. because it is not even good to be disproportionately prepared for extremes that do not end up happening, because then too many resources have gone in that direction, which thereby ends up causing lack of preparation for the more likely scenarios...
I am not saying it is easy, and it is also an ongoing moving target.
Let's try to use more recent events rather than going back into 2011.. and let's say for example, in early 2021, you thought that we were going to the moon.. at least supra $100k, so you stocked up on BTC, but then when we got a 50% correction from $64,895 to $28,600 in May/June/July you were not adequately prepared for that either psychologically or financially and you pretty much blew your whole wadd buying BTC on the dip down before the BTC price even dropped below $50k . so you needed some cash along the way and you also started to fear possible further drops.. and so you shaved some off and kind of ended up doing the opposite of what you should have done (these kinds of behaviors happened to quite a few experienced guys).
Then we get a run up to $69k between August and November, so you played it cool.. because you were not sure if it was going to be real.. but when the price got above $46k/$50k.. you started feeling like you should buy..... I know, I know.. lots of variations of mistakes can be made, but these mistakes seem to deal with trying to believe that you know where the price is going and failing/refusing to adequately prepare for either direction.
I will admit that even I had cut down some of my BTC sales between $55k and $80k because I considered that to be noman's land.. but I ONLY changed my amounts by a small amount... like maybe each sell order was 10% less or something like that.. It was a change that made a presumption and a gamble that would have allowed me to profit more if the deadman zone scenario ended up playing out as anticipated. .and sure it was not really a bad plan and much of it did end up happening.. but we did not go past noman's land... so my whole adjustment ended up at least causing me some opportunity costs, but I did not make the adjustments so great as to really cause me too much pain.. there were ways I could still make adjustments because it was ONLY a small deviation from what I was already doing.
You (JayJuanGee) plan your moves and make seemingly smart decisions based on your own framework of rules, despite doing this for a long time I still do a lot of risky moves and lose money often because I suck at planning.
I still have emotions and make mistakes along the way. .and maybe my preaching about how to prepare for either direction causes me to attempt to emphasize my own putting those ideas to practice.. but does not completely remove me from emotions and/or mistakes and/or gambling.. but I still believe I do the gambling with way less amounts so that I am not going to feel as if it matters either way.
I believe that one of my earliest of mistakes taught me a pretty decent lesson... I have told the story before, but in mid-2015, I had just begun to put my sell on the way up practice into place. Prior to that I had never sold any BTC without replacing within a few days. So in October when the BTC price shot up from $270-ish to $500, I started to remove my sell orders that were above $350, and then when the price got to nearly $500, I said fuck it, and I used a pretty large amount of my extra cash to buy some BTC (the opposite of what I was supposed to be doing)... When the BTC price crashed back down from $500 to $300, I was kicking myself for several days and trying to consider if there was any way out of this matter... Initially I had to adjust my practice in such a way that I could not buy or sell or do anything until the price got back over $500... but then I realized that might cause me to not be able to practice at all.. so instead of completely locking myself off, I just engaged in some categorizations in which I moved values around and accounted for the mistake in a certain way that allowed me to return to my practice of buying on the way down and selling on the way up.. and of course, I had to be careful with the amounts that I used, because my mistake had cost me, but I still had some money with which to work, but I took from my budget and attempted to be more strict on myself in following my system and also to not be deviating from my system with such extremes because I had already thought through my system so I should not be letting actual market movements get in the way.. I wanted to continuously be ahead of the BTC price... so in that particular story.. by BTC purchase at $500 did not become profitable until after May 2016.. so pretty much those BTC that I purchased at $500 were locked up for more than 6 months.
Another example is late 2018. I knew that i had some pretty damned BIG expenses coming due at the end of the year.. and I pretty much did not sufficiently prepare myself because in some sense I thought that the $6k was likely the bottom, so why prepare further.. I can just cash out some BTC at any time as the bills come in. Yeah, through the year I had already cashed out quite a bit.. but then when the BTC price dropped from $6k to $3k, I ended up having to reconsider my cashflow.. and even that the BTC price might drop further, and since I was buying on the way down from $6k to $3k, I did not have as much cash available... .so even with my earlier preparations, I still ended up having to take some remedial measures that caused me to sell something like 3% of my stash.. and then I was able to make up for 1% or 2% along the way (or half of the amount sold), but still it was not following my practices sufficiently and preparing for some BIG expenses that I knew were coming... and it ended up costing me.. but still with NOT very large portions of my stash.. but still enough to cause me to have to learn a lesson from that.
Even though prior to getting in bitcoin in late 2013, I had 20 years experiences in trying to manage my cashflow and various investments and even tweaking from time to time, the intensity of BTC's volatility and uncertainties caused me to have to improve my skills and better tailor them to bitcoin and to just follow bitcoin more than I did with my previous investments and cashflow, and I really doubt that mistakes still cannot be made, but I think that with more time in BTC and just various investments, we should be able to learn along the way and learn to both prepared for either direction (including extremes) but also to maybe figure out how to tweak along the way that is not playing with too much of our holdings and not really deviating too much from our overall plans... and, yeah, even if we are not really able to have a lot of flexibilities in some aspects of our timeline, there are ways that we can attempt to understand which aspects of our timeline are more urgent and to adequately prepare for some matters that come up in our timeline that are less flexible and less discretionary... including considering what would be the various consequences for certain scenarios to play out.
Even in recent times, I have been reconsidering the amount of cash that I have already preset for my buys down to $20k.. and considering if I need to make some adjustments to those buy down amounts and also the amount of extra cash that I have available for some expenses that I know to be coming up in 2022 and in 2023.. sometimes trying to stay ahead of these matters can be difficult.. but if we have seen some mistakes along the way, are there ways to tweak what we are doing in order to better prepare our lil selfies for either direction if we can see that we might have inadequate preparations in one direction or the other... and BIG moves in BTC price can bring these matters to light.. and also BIG events in the macrospace can also bring these matters to light.
It still seems to me that the longer that we are in BTC, the more options that we should have been able to make for ourselves, even if we continue to make mistakes along the way.. and even if we perceive our BTC portfolio to be in a bit of a messed up performance situation currently.
One of the techniques that can be practiced to try to remedy some mistakes of running out of cash is to increase some of the sales amounts slightly and to continue to buy on the way down but smaller amounts.. and just try to stay ahead of matters while realizing that you could end up getting fucked.. but if you take some remedial measures to tweak what you are doing, everything may well work things out after 3-12 months.. even though currently you are feeling in a bit of a pickle.. and sure, you still might be gambling that the price will not go shooting down.. but you should attempt to prepare yourself for that possibility too.. both psychologically and financially.. and yeah, there likely will not be any kind of ideal way to deal with the whole matter because sometimes the mistakes that were made end up causing some needs to suck up (and lock in) losses right away.. .but yeah, it can take a decent amount of work to attempt to make up for a mistake and to do it in a way that does not repeat the same kinds of overly gambling errors that likely brought you into the mistake in the first place.
Also, sometimes when you fix a mistake.. and you even set forth a solid plan, some folks might criticize you because you are way less likely to make a killing or make it to fuck you status in the same timeline as you had projected... and in that regard, each of us has to realize that it can take a whole hell of a long time to both build our principle and also to take measures to protect our principle even if there might be losses in the short term and even if there might be more than 3-12 months to recover.. sometimes, there are needs to rethink the plan in terms of the 4-10 year timeline. and to consider that it could take 4-10 years for any actions that you are taking right now and at this moment to work themselves out to show that you did the right thing given the totality of the context and accounting for you psychological and financial circumstances.
I accumulate BTC when possible, trade when I need, and my approach is often to learn about the situation, the more info the better, to develop a "gut feeling" for how things will move roughly, and then I act on that and previous experience, have a few simple tactics, but nothing sophisticated.
Overall, isn't that what all of us (each of us) are attempting to achieve.. to best tailor our own approach to our own mental and financial circumstances... and to tweak along the way?
At the risk of repeating myself, it does seem that there is some evidence that the level of your getting upset is likely showing that there are some ways that you have overinvested in bitcoin.
I don't exactly know the solution because sure if the BTC price shot up from $39k to $58k, then maybe you could have mechanisms in place that allow you to take some off of the table... but we know that our lil fiend does not always cooperate with what might be best for us... but then we are gambling too much if we do not prepare ourselves psychologically and financially for the BTC price going down rather than up (and maybe also getting stuck in sideways).. so .. it seems that if you really think about the matter, there are ways for you to prepare yourself for other less preferable scenarios rather than just having the shoot up from $39k to $58k to save you from your own predicament.
By the way, the BTC price shooting up has saved me several times from my own self-created predicaments.. .hahahahahaha
But I still believe that it is better to attempt to be prepared for a variety of scenarios, even if it may well end up resulting in lesser profits, delays in getting to fuck you status and perhaps some other less profitable and less enjoyable scenarios.
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