..... if they were really watching it would have been gone already I think.
That is not true.
A compromised key could end up with stolen funds 20 years later.
If I were a day trader I’d be a little concerned that the ETF volumes seemed to have peaked. If we see lower volumes again tomorrow it could be a warning sign. Something to watch for. With the halving right around the corner though I think you’re better off sitting through any short term pain.
That is not true.
Even if the ETF volumes go down, they are still a lot (at magnanimous levels), and likely to continue to be a lot even if they go down from here (which is a questionable presumption, at best).
Another thing is that we can experience a BTC price correction at any time, so good thing that some of us don't fuck around with trying to figure out short-term BTC price moves, which can go up or down in the opposite direction than expected at any time, even if all of the sentiment and momentum seem to be going in an expected way.. and yeah, whether the sudden reversal lasts is another thing.. which surely you mentioned the squeezing of leveraged positions as part of the motivation to make a large price push in the short term, that does not usually end up sticking.. but sometimes after a sudden move in one direction or another the BTC price will end up getting stuck in the range that it moved to.. but sustainability frequently is difficult to sustain when the BTC price movement is in the upward direction - but never say never.
In other words, fuck supposed ETF volume decreases. .the overall information is that the BTC spot ETFs are an overwhelming success beyond imagination and are likely going to continue in that direction, even if the volumes might perhaps maybe could come down some.. There is no meaningful and important substantive evidence to say otherwise, even if you might be able to see some temporary supposed losses of volume momentum in your minute candles.
...JJG at #661629
That was about as comprehensive a reply I have ever received for anything I have ever written in my life (inc. the Spanish 4 paper I wrote in high school that Miss Breiner raked me over the coals on...).* * *
I am glad that I am doing my part to bring back good memories.
I have nothing against spreadsheets, but they're not my style re BTC buying and selling. Sure, they can provide plausible number scenarios, but I just use a calculator and notes on paper. Just as a by-the-by, most of my formal planning is done re the big things (heirs).
That surely works. I used to do that in the 90s.
One thing I find so helpful about spreadsheets, once you put the information in, is that you can manipulate one or two variables and then see how the numbers play out quite differently and it might take a lot more time to create those various sheets of paper with alternative scenarios.
Yes, nicely perceived that my plan is basically in my head, leaving open the possibilities of course corrections. One thing I have learned: we are all different! Also very perceptive of you to offer up the observation that it, my buying and selling tactics, might be (at least in part) in my subconscious... What are you, some kinda combat psychologist?
We all do those kinds of things. It is just a matter of degree, and surely there are people who can keep a lot of that kind of stuff in their head, and some people do it better than others, while at the same time, there are likely ONLY so many scenarios that you can keep in your head at the same time... part of the benefits of plotting it out.
I do appreciate that sometimes it makes more sense to either work it out in your head or to talk it through with "a friend" or maybe even do an interpretive dance, and yeah, I recall that when I was learning dance moves, I would have to write them out, and others just do them over and over and others would learn by watching videos and even making videos of themselves doing the dance moves... so we learn in differing ways.
When it comes to selling, both in 2017 and 2021 I sold some past the ATHs. I would attribute A LOT of luck to this process of selling roughly the same amounts before and after the peaks. I was very lucky to have sold off a sliver on the very day of THE ATH, but not at the tippy-top peak of that day.
That is all fine and dandy if you don't run out of coins. If we say that 2017 might have been more difficult if we might consider that maybe a lot of folks might have considered the likely top to be in the $3k to $5k range, so there were a lot of sellers who ran out of coins way before the $19,666 top.
So maybe part of the reason for your better success in 2021 might have had to do with the price not being as toppie in 2021 as it had been in 2017.. or maybe you just had some other ways of measuring what you perceive to be success - which I am kind of gathering success for you would be an ability to sell mostly at the top so that you could buy back, versus I might consider success differently, such as selling a reasonable amount of coins and having more coins to sell in case the price continued to go up.. but yeah, I can see how some folks (like me) might have some regrets when the price ends up correcting and relatively speaking we had not really ended up selling very many coins.
Re the whole topic of "not having made enough (exact optimal amount perhaps better expressed???) money" in BTC and/or retained enough to have better "alpha", well, yeah, had I had more perfect vision of the future, sure I would have bought more here, sold less there... [I noted you explicitly made the same point] But who can do that optimally all the time?
There are a lot of expressions to cover these kinds of ideas in terms of the futility of trying to time tops and bottoms, and even acknowledging luck in some of it.
There are also a lot of expressions about trying to be directionally correct, and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Many of the profits in bitcoin come from mostly holding onto it, but surely once any of us have established a position then we can end up playing the waves and even being in front of them to some extent, as long as we do not get too greedy.. so never run out of bitcoin to be able to sell on the way up and never run out of cash to be able to buy on the way down. The way that each of us does this can vary, and some guys will have better results than others in terms of performance, and there could also be variances of success that are still successful, but might not be as successful as another guy.
Some of the measures are somewhat personal and subjective too, so we cannot necessarily measure in terms of who has more money, but maybe instead in terms of various financial goals that might have had been set and then how well that any of our strategies had been tailored to our individual circumstances... so for example, some of us might prefer to run the risk of not making as much money as long as we have protection for the upside and the downside, and so hedging in both directions tends to not be as profitable, but it may well give way more peace of mind, which also may well lead us to being able to sleep better, which has its own benefits.
Pas de moi.
Nice.
I made enough to really have made me very happy re 2021, that was a nice amount, even if it really didn't change anything fundamental re my family finances. So, no condo in Dubai, at least yet...
You may or may not have had been in a position to allocate higher amounts or even to just let your BTC holdings run over a couple of cycles.
I consider my own trading levels to be so low that I have about 2.5 cycles of mostly just HODLing, even though yeah, I fuck around with selling on the way up and buying on the way down, but when you really think about what I am doing, I am largely ONLY playing around with only a few percentages of my holdings... so yeah, what I do might change in the future, especially since my holdings are around 61x in profits rather than being 3x to 20x in 2017, and yeah I fluctuated between 16x and 70x in profits in 2021, 2022 and 2023, but we seem to be moving back to higher levels, and who needs those levels of profits? I mean even if I am not completely cashing out, I could cash out several times my investment several times and still have a lot left over... so there seems to be way more compounding effects that come from mostly allowing the BTC to ride through a couple of cycles before selling large amounts.. .. Yeah, maybe I ended up selling around 10% of my stash in 2017 during that wave.. I am not exactly sure, but I think in 2021, I probably sold less than 5%, but then in both cases most of that was bought back in stages as the BTC price corrected back down in 2018 and 2022 respectively.
You made some interesting other points that I have not run into before:
-- Optionality, a concept I have run into before, but very valid re BTC gains, even for small amounts invested (1% - 2%). Right now, I/we (I gave my grandsons some) we are running at some 3% of net wealth in BTC. I'd have to check my numbers, but something on the order of 3%, maybe a bit more, was what I held just before my selling in 2021. I want to think more about your comments on this.
The smaller numbers end up bringing optionality, but also they can really have magnifying effects when they are BIGGER. I mean, I claim that my own input into BTC was 10% of my investment portfolio by the end of 2014 but then I ended up with 13.5% by the end of 2015 through my own additional investment into bitcoin, but it went up to right around 80% in late 2017, came back down to 42% in late 2018, went back up to 89% in late 2021 and came back down to 63% in mid 2022.. You can see the numbers in
my chart at the bottom of the post, I have not updated since mid-2022, but it is likely back in the upper 80%s or maybe even lower 90%s .. and the post 2015 changes are mostly due to changes in the appreciation of the asset (namely bitcoin) rather than very much dealing with my own actions.
And the point that I am trying to relate is that the BTC holdings have outperformed everything else and that comes from mostly holding and not taking profits.. but I suppose if there are profits and they are mostly reinvested, those kinds of things happened with my own BTC maintenance and management too... there has been some money that I have taken out and I did not return into the BTC pool, but then in late 2022, I was injecting some new money too since I was mostly running out of BTC allocated money, especially once the BTC price got below $20k... so I had injected some new money.. but then I might have taken some of that out too.. so, I am still trying to figure out where I am at in regards to whether on balance more went in or more came out in 2022 and then into 2023.
-- That was an interesting observation as well re increasing our %-share as the BTC network strengthens, and we see more new & bigger entrants. This promises to be fascinating, I guess in the months and years to come. 5% - 25% is more than I want to devote, though, as I am not 100% convinced that BTC is going to work out as most (inc. me) think.
For sure part of the idea of asymmetric bet is that you don't need to be 100% convinced. You just invest in accordance to some senses that you have, and if you are more wimpy, then you invest on the lower and and if you are more aggressive you invest on the more aggressive end, and neither should require 100% conviction... but you know that you would be losing more the more that you invest, while at the same time having greater possible upside.. while at the same time, knowing that time in the market is frequently better than trying to time the market.
Everyone has to consider their
9 factors, too.. and so if you are getting more elderly or in your liquidation phase rather than in your accumulation phase, then you may well not be as incline to increase your allocations in anything or to change around your current allocations very much.
-- I also like your idea (new to me) of studying and using the 200 day moving average in your thinking. Even if it's just for perspective. I would like to see how the pretty clear patterns of BTC 4-year cycle daily pricing (to date anyway) fit in with the moving average...
You can plug any date into
the tool that bitmover and I created and you can see the difference between BTC spot price and the 200-wma on any particular date. You can also see that so far, the most that the BTC price has ever been below the 200-wma was in November 2022 when it had a couple of days that were right around 34% below the 200WMA.. look at November 10th and November 22nd.
You can also quickly see the numbers for tops such as December 17, 2017 when BTC prices were more than 1,400% above the 200-WMA or other tops in 2013 and or 2021.
-- I also remember from 2021 that I started off my selling-by-slice by selling slices that, at first, were perhaps too large... Which of course meant that my smaller, later slices were less lucrative at the higher prices. This relates to your comment about running out too soon of BTC to sell should the price run up to VERY HIGH LEVELS (say, over $150,000). I will certainly keep that in mind not to sell off much of my BTC for too low.
Of course if you are either striving to use your proceeds for consumptions or even to try to buy back some, then you are aiming towards selling most of it.. ..
but if you are mostly holding through the cycles and merely using your sales as a kind of insurance, then you sell lower amounts and you never run out of BTC... but then your networth goes down quite a bit during the correction.
Excellent thought provoking comments, thank you!
The purpose of this thread/forum .. sharing ideas.. and it goes both ways... for sure. There are various ways to play your holdings.
EDIT: Yep, 10-4 rgr that about NO "yield producing products", NO sh*tcoins, NO leverage. Big mistakes are costly and demoralizing.
Tempting for people to do those things.. especially when they might be trying to rush the process. I frequently suggest to anyone that if they are investing 10% of their salary, then it is going to take them 10 years to reach a whole year's salary invested. So people get impatient, and sure you can invest more an there are smart ways to be more aggressive, but then when the error is on the side of taking unnecessary risks, then there are chances of losing everything and then having to start over, which surely can be costly.. but so many will be tempted into gambling rather than investing, and it might even seem to pay off, until it doesn't .. so that can be a problem to lose all of your principle and then to assume that you can just get it back.. but surely there are people who really love gambling and they might even call what they are doing as investing.
Poll
