[edited out]
Yes, trading and DCAing, though primarily DCA.
Between the time of my first post and that you responded to my post, I had edited my post and I had added some further questions and attempts at explanation.. which I will try to go over again here.
It seems to me that if your primary goal is to accumulate BTC, then the best ways to do that are through various forms of buying and attempting to strategize your buying in order to attempt to maximize your buying aggressiveness without getting overexposed.. so of course, you have to make sure that you balance finances and psychology in such a way that your regular expenses are all accounted for, and you have a sufficient cushion in your budget to deal with emergency expenses as well (including a likely need to have resources that you would draw from first as an emergency fund before you would touch your BTC).
The three main ways of accumulating BTC is DCA, lump sum investing and buying on dips.. and I would consider selling (which is involved in trading) to be a more advance technique that would ONLY come into play after you have reached your BTC accumulation goals which would also likely include criteria such as either being over-invested and/or making sure that your BTC portfolio is sufficiently in profits... and you are also ONLY selling amounts that are small enough that you would not be bothered if the BTC price continues to go up and you are never able to buy back with the amounts that you had sold.
Of course, guys here have variations of their own ways of employing these kinds of various strategies and what kinds of formulas that they might have created, and some of us don't agree about what might be considered better practices - and in the end, you are completely responsible for your own choices regarding what balances to reach - and of course, you are going to be responsible for various extra risks that you might take or the degree to which you might end up being overly aggressive or overly whimpy in your approach to BTC.. including if you end up getting involved in shitcoins and/or gambling and if so how much...
some guys fuck up their whole long term investing approach because they start to believe some of the shitcoin talking points in regards to believing that some of the longer term accumulation principles apply to that too.. rather than getting in and out if you are going to get involved in that crap at all.
Since I'm still learning how to trade, I buy spot when I feel satisfied with the dip.
I have been in bitcoin for nearly 9 years, and I feel that I did not really sell any BTC for about my first two years because largely if I did sell any it was sell and then buy and replace, and when I finally did implement a trading strategy of selling on the way up and buying on the way down it was ONLY a very small amount of my portfolio and only a small portion of my profits.. so for example, back when BTC was $300, if I had 10 BTC, then if the BTC price went up $10, then that would be $100 in profits so long the price was higher than my purchase price, but I would ONLY authorize the maximum of selling 50% of the profits in the worse case scenario, and many times, I would be selling less than 20% of the profits, and another part of the formula would be that I could sell up to 10% at most of the value of my holdings for every 100% that the BTC price went up.. and frequently the amount sold was way less than the 10% - and these days it is probably less than 5%. of course, with buy back built in, too.. and expectations that I don't necessarily expect to even be able to buy back at whatever I sell.
There can be formulas for attempting to insure your BTC holding for the downside.. just in case it happens, but it may well not be necessarily considered as wanting to profit but a kind of hedge of downside risk, and I have never really considered myself a trader and I have tried to increase the intervals of sales and the spreads to end up gravitating more into falling into a kind of swing trader which would mean the the sell and buy orders are triggered less frequently .. even though for sure it can get tempting to narrow the intervals and the spreads in order to profit from the inevitable BTC volatility - even though I still like to consider my practice as primarily a hedge against downside like a kind of an insurance rather than trying to make any profits, even though the profits do end up playing out as kinds of side benefits - not the primary focus.
I've been using bitcoin for almost 7 years, but not as OG you guys.
In the whole scheme of things 7 years is a decently long period of time, and I ONLY will reach 9 years if I am able to live long enough to be alive by late November and to still be into bitcoin at that time..
So you have a decent amount of time into bitcoin, but sure maybe you had been distracted into other things and got into shitcoins or even were not sufficiently aggressive enough in your approach to bitcoin.
On a personal level, I consider my lil selfie to have had been sufficiently aggressive right out of the gate. I started in November 2013, and I largely created a 6 month budget that involved some level of attempting to front load my investment into BTC which was largely a DCA approach with some lump sum investments injected in there too... I pretty much extended my investment into BTC plan an additional 6 months of budget and by the end of the first year (which would have been late 2014), I had figured out that I had reached my BTC accumulation goals of having 10% of my quasi-liquid investment portfolio into BTC.. but then I ended up over-accumulating and getting up to about 13.5%-ish of my quasi-liquid investment portfolio into BTC by the end of 2015..
so it seemed to have had been sufficiently aggressive for me right from the get go, even though I was trying to budget and to hold back some of my investment into BTC because anyone could look at the BTC price charts and see that by the time I got into BTC, it had already gone up about 100x during that year (2013).
I can surely appreciate that there were a sufficient number of folks who were way less enthusiastic about BTC as compared with me during those times, and increasingly so through 2014 and 2015 when the bitcoin downity and slum seem to be never ending.. it was difficult to remain enthusiastic about BTC during those times, especially when I had quite a bit of time during 2015 in which the value of my BTC holdings were quite a bit less than 50% of the amount that I had put in.. and also there were several times that it dipped into the mid 30%.. so it was not easy for any of the then HODLers and BTC accumulators to be excited about their BTC holdings unless they had been holding cash and ready, willing and able to inject cash in the low $200s or even when the BTC price had dipped below $200 a couple of times.. and maybe the dip in August 2015 did not go below $200 but there was not much if any space between the BTC price and $200 either.. which just did not seem right for anyone believing that BTC had fundamentals, but the price would not go up. and seems like the whole market cap (all then existing 15 million coins) could have been bought for less than $3 billion... .
I faced adversities before that hindrance my storing,
Many of us likely made mistakes in regards to our bitcoin security, especially the longer that we been in bitcoin, and then also if there have been various ways that any of us have tried to get involved in various aspects of bitcoin's ecosystem... sometimes we may well end up being more exposed than we should be and we might not even take adequate safeguards.. and it can be especially grueling in some ways if the BTC price goes shooting up from $250 to nearly $20k in a matter of less than 2 years, and then some of the value of the coins that we had been holding (that we might have considered as dust) end up having a lot of value. and maybe even inadequately secured accounting for the amount of value contained therein.
but given the current state of the economy, I'm making a new start by storing sats. I only trade with paper money or demo account.
Hopefully we learn ways to take additional safeguards over the years, and even the safeguards and best practices can become a moving target in terms of both what might be discovered weaknesses, and also if we might not have been paying enough attention to how values might have gone up too.. even going from less than $10k per coin to $64k (6.4x) and then later in the year to $69k (6.9x) may well have contributed to values of holdings to become in need of greater attention regarding how much value was held in what kinds of potentially insecure locations.
Thank you for your interest mate!
Seems like we try to learn from each other, so sometimes getting into the nitty gritty can be helpful to a variety of members here, including part of the reasons that we are posting in public ways.. besides talking about various injustices in the world and looking at pictures of what some guys at or are thinking about eating (such as McD vs Burger King fetishes.. who would have thunk?)..
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