Lesson threads, learn from others and be prepared for this bear market

Disclaimers

All of these lessons are not mine. I read them on Twitter, felt impressed and want to share them here. I declare source link of each thread. I don't use quote for each tweet but the link to opening tweet of each thread is used. In some tweets, there are images, I don't add images here, if you want to see them, after reading text, you can open original tweets to see full content with text and image.

Lessons can be learned from your own time, capital and loses. Fortunately, there are good people who are readily to share their lessons. They don't cover their past loses, share them with you. I hope you will read those threads, lessons and use them wisely.

Limbo @Cryptolimbo_ (Click on link to read the whole thread)

The First and the most important thing is to ‘SURVIVE’. Protect your capital and have spare cash ready to be deployed when opportunity arrives.
Speaking of Opportunity , learn patience and the art of doing nothing. Don’t jump on any random $ALTS that people shill as a gem. There will always be opportunities in Crypto so don’t waste your entire capital before real opportunity presents itself.
It is hard to accept but the Market is ruthless and doesn’t care about your xyz coin's Fundamentals. $BTC going down will drag each and every other $ALT with it so better to accept the loss other than HODLING something just because it has solid Fundamentals.
Looking to buy your Favorite coin just because it is already down 90% ? You’ll be delighted to know that it can go down another 90%. Most of the coins won’t survive after a Bear Market.
Found an $ALT that is constantly under development ? Team is building even in harsh conditions ? The Roadmap is being followed ? The Project is generating revenue ? This is the kind of $ALT that you should look to DCA once you see ‘signs’ of bottom forming.
There are always new trends in Crypto. Learn to identify these trends and ride the hype train until it lasts. Fighting the trend will only result in you losing the opportunity. I thought NFTs were a meme when they launched, so paid no attention to it. Saw people making insane-money , still neglected it only to enter them on the Top.
The best place to invest in during a Bear Market is yourself. Learn new skills, spend time on improving yourself. Practice as much as you can and prepare yourself for the next crypto Mania.
Don’t keep all your Funds in one place. Learn to diversify in everything. Don’t use a single wallet to keep all your funds , don’t deploy all your funds into a single protocol to generate APY, don’t deploy all your funds into a single coin.
There are tons of other ways in Crypto to make money. Hunt Airdrops, apply for moderator roles in new Projects, good with graphics? - start making infographics, good at researching? - tons of people on CT are looking to hire researchers. Crypto is still an evolving industry. The opportunities are abundant.
This is something I wished I learned sooner - Interact with people, form groups, share your knowledge. Having people around you with a similar mindset will push your growth more than you can imagine.
The last one is to Learn from your mistakes , make notes of everything and don’t lose hope. Stop trying to be rich overnight and start grinding.

Aylo (Alpha_pls) (Click on link to read a whole thread)
9 mistakes and what I learned

I firmly believe you can do very well in crypto if you are willing to face up to your mistakes. Sure, they are painful and you feel fucking stupid looking back, but its very necessary you reflect and internalise those lessons.
I'm a regular retail investor with no formal background in finance. Everything I have learned over the last five years has come through trial and error.
In general, I would say I had more losses than wins this cycle, but the wins I had still meant I did reasonably well.
That's the beauty of crypto, there is always another opportunity. Every single crypto veteran has had their ass handed to them multiple times. You can get very beat up, you can get knocked down, but you have to get up and go again.
I have always had long term spot bags that I just accumulate more of, so these mistakes are mostly related to funds I designated for more active trading.
I'll save my biggest mistake for last, but in no particular order otherwise:
- Didn't shake bear market PTSD off quick enough from the previous cycle. This is something I'm going to be very aware of in the next couple of years
  - My biggest fuck up here was AAVE. I scaled in around $20 ($LEND at the time, so it was actually 0.20). Sold most around $50 on the way up during DeFi summer because I didn't want to give up profits (bear market does this to you).
  - DeFi was such a big paradigm shift, but my bear market PTSD was clouding my judgement. AAVE ran to $650 or something. Yes, I made profit, but there was a clear mistake here.
- Smart contract due diligence. Luckily I learned this lesson early. Lost $35k to a DeFi exploit in late 2020. This was some profit I thought I had banked after DeFi summer. This one hurt at the time.
  - I was taking very stupid risks chasing unsustainable yield and doing minimal due diligence on smart contracts. I learned the basics of what to look for in smart contracts so as not to get rugged.
  - I upped my opsec knowledge and haven't been exploited since.
- Form a thesis and let it play out. I was very early to crypto gaming. I had strong conviction that earning from games was going to catch on. Yeah, seems obvious now, but it wasn't two years ago.
  - I had a large position in $UOS, which I bought at 0.04. Ultra was building a competitor to Steam on the blockchain. I held for a while, got impatient & fudded myself out of my thesis because I thought I could allocate that capital into a narrative that was closer to playing out.
  - $UOS ran to $2.50 a year and a bit later. I would have taken profit much earlier than that, but still missed out on a great trade.
  - Did the same thing with interoperability. Figured $QNT had a great chance of running hard at some point due to interoperability being a huge unsolved problem and Quant Network were one of the few teams taking it on. Paper handed $QNT in the teens. It ran to over $400.
  - I had done a fair amount of research to form those theses and was happy with the r/r, but timing when they might play out was very difficult. Patience is required, especially when your thesis isn't necessarily clear to everyone. That's where you have the chance to make the biggest gains. It's fine to move on if your thesis gets invalidated, but let that happen first.
- Return to value: $LINK had one hell of a run against $ETH and $BTC in 2020. I got carried away and thought $LINK could keep gaining as "staking was coming soon".
  - De-risking even 30% of my $LINK into $ETH or $BTC would have been a god tier trade. I did eventually move a lot of $LINK into $ETH, but only after it had lost a lot of value against $ETH.
  - Any time you see an alt has gone parabolic against ETH and BTC take profit. No matter what your conviction or reason you can conjure for why the outperformance will continue, just take profit.
  - I am very bullish on the long term future of $LINK, but every alt historically gives its gains back to BTC and ETH. You should always be looking to take advantage of alt runs and return to value. You will get to accumulate more of your desired alt this way as well.
NFTs - I had no edge: I had no real framework for assessing NFTs, yet I still jumped in thinking I could spot the next BAYC. A display of arrogance no doubt. Down in ETH and now have multiple horrid NFTs as a reminder of my stupidity in my wallet.
- Ultimately, I was up against people with an edge and I had no edge. I developed some sort of framework to evaluate NFTs, but not after I had made several bad purchases.
When shit looks bad, don't force it. I had the right idea around September last year. I wanted to significantly de-risk and wait for the coming bear. I could have touched grass, got away from the screens and chilled out. But what did I do instead?
- I thought I could squeeze a bit more out of the market. Bought into two projects ($POKT and $MAGIC) when it was clear the macro was horrible and the cycle was coming to an end.
- I bought these with fundamentals in mind and was excited by the potential of both. I was almost too excited by the potential that I inevitably became a bag holder.
Don't knife catch leverage unwinding events. I think this one speaks for itself. May 2021. Shit went so much deeper than I thought it would. Lost an unnecessary sum of money trying to catch a falling knife.
Leverage: 99% of people will eventually lose money if they play the leverage game. I played the game. I borrowed against my collateral on AAVE.
If you can secure your future, do that first. This was my most painful mistake this cycle.