Regarding your specific point about knocking on the doors of $10k, of course, the last day or so has caused that imminently pending situation to become less imminent, but jeez, like I already mentioned, I was becoming quite skeptical if we were going to get back up into the $9ks, just a couple of days ago, and kind of felt like we could be testing support in the lower $8ks again, and then pretty much within less than 24 hours, we went all the way through the $9ks as if we were going to skip them completely, but then that did end up resulting in too much too soon.... so sure, we are back in the mid $9ks and perhaps wondering about the next short-term BTC price direction. s.
Exactly the same here, usually when things that are hyped fail to live up to expectations, like the halving did, then things just fall apart. I'm thinking of all the times people thought price would pick up and did not, it usually led to liquidations as people gave up their orders but weirdly enough this didn't happen in this case. Here we are where we were last Saturday too.
Bitcoin price movements can surely test the patience of any HODLer/accumulator, and of course the traders are trying to take advantage of as much of the volatility as they can, and frequently we will find BTC defying the expectations of the squiggly lines on the charts.
Even thinking back to April-June 2019, the BTC price movement from $4,200 to $13,880 caused a lot of HODLers to speculate that BTC was on its way up, and surely in retrospect there can be all kinds of speculation regarding why the continued BTC upwards movement did not happen, why the movement was ahead of its time, or why we are in a purported bear market currently, and whether or NOT any of us buys some of those analytical angles in terms of describing BTC price history (that we can all see in front of us), it is even more difficult to describe while we are in it.
So, sometimes even the most lame of BTC price predictors can proclaim in retrospect that a 3.5x BTC price appreciation in about 3 months is overheated; however, before such price movement happened, there probably would have been close to zero chart-a-lists who might have anticipated such outrageous BTC price movement, and probably even some traders have learned from experience to prepare for such outrageous scenarios which disproportionately benefits HODLers who did not sell too much too soon and did not end up betting against the corn while in the midst of that movement. Surely once it reached its top, then it would have become profitable to bet against bitcoin at that point, and could have paid off handsomely in the past almost year (even though my personal strategy does not involve any of the betting against corn, tactics).
My personal investment system strives NOT to really call short term BTC price directions, but to both attempt to profit from the volatility, let the price come to me, and to anticipate that in the longer term the BTC price is going to continue to be higher.. including that so far in BTC's history, the BTC price has always been higher 4 years after any earlier price point, and there is likely going to be some time in the future in which that framing of BTC price dynamics is NOT going to be true (including wondering whether December 2021 is going to deliver BTC prices that are higher than $19,666 or not? still to be determined).
Anyhow, so far, BTC price dynamics have sufficiently trended up in order to ensure that so long as at least any BTC accumulator/HODLer has had at least a 4 year time horizon, even if such person has bought at the top of any such BTC price movement, the price is likely to be higher 4 years later.. even while in the middle of that 4 year period, there may be several times in which the BTC buyer/hodler had wished to have had saved a bit more fiat to have been able to buy more BTC at lower prices in the up and down cyclings.
So, for example, if a BTC accumulating person had $2,000 to invest in bitcoin, that person might be a bit upset for a while if s/he had bought .11111BTC at $18k in December 2017, when the same amount of cash could have been used to buy .5 BTC at $4k in December 2018 (1 year later) or even in March 2020 (almost 2.5 years later).
Personally, even though I keep track of my input costs into BTC, when I had been in my most intensive BTC accumulation stages in 2014 and 2015, I had just continued to accumulate BTC on a regular basis and tried NOT to think too much about where the BTC price might go during that period in which I was building my target BTC accumulation levels. So there are many times that I could look back and second guess my strategy and verify that I could have accumulated way more than twice as much BTC with the same amount of fiat capital that I had employed into BTC, but I still find that second-guessing to be almost useless because if I continue to invest in bitcoin whether it goes up or down, I still have given myself upwards price movement insurance. In other words, while in the midst of the BTC price movement, we cannot really know how much more time we are going to be spending at x, y, or z price levels or if those BTC buying levels are going to end up disappearing.
I have seen a lot of folks making way BIGGER mistakes than me by waiting or NOT acting, because they are either failing to continue to invest in BTC, and they are waiting for lower BTC prices before taking action.
So, any of us might consider if we have goals to accumulate a certain quantity of BTC and we have not reached our BTC accumulation goals yet, then it is much better to just act on a regular basis, even if we can only afford $20 per week or some modest amount that we feel comfortable putting into bitcoin, it will still add up over time, and sometimes keeping a bit of extra fiat to buy on dips, can be helpful too, during our BTC accumulation phases.
So another hypothetical, maybe we could afford $20 per week to put into BTC, but we want to prepare ourselves for BTC price dips, too, so instead we decide to inject $15 per week into BTC and to just save the $5 per week in order to be prepared for buying more on dips. I know that these numbers might sound small, and I am using small numbers to demonstrate that each of us needs to be reasonable in terms of making sure that we are working within our budget, but also that almost anyone can establish some kind of plan that is going to add up to be a lot of BTC in the future as long as the timeline is long enough, and it frequently takes 30 years or more for someone to build their retirement portfolio, but I bet with BTC there are decent chances that the quantity of time could end up being considerably reduced.
So even with $20 per week over the past 7 years,
the BTC accumulator with a dollar cost averaging (DCA) approach would have accumulated nearly 14 BTC by now, and even if it might be a lot more difficult to accumulate that quantity of BTC, there is still likely to continue to be decent ongoing BTC price performance in the coming years.
Seems that at some point, we might no longer be able to obtain BTC in the 4 digits realm, and that could happen within weeks or maybe it takes a couple more years before we clear out of the 4 digits realm completely, but the person who DCAs into BTC should not really care so much either way, as long as s/he has a long enough investment time horizon, it will likely continue to work out as long as s/he also figures out safe ways to store the accumulated BTC, too.