i pray God things are as you say. I hold on so far but now things are getting serious. Months passed and I have only lost money. My idea at the beginning was optimistic, I said, in late 2013 it went down, in 2014 it will, it has to rise again, as usual. But so far, I was wrong.
I can tell you, I invested more than 80% of all I had. If my parents knew that... I would be in serious trouble. Part of it was their present for my 18 years and for my university studies.
I have been in and out, going short and going long in Bitcoin and since 2014, have been losing money big time. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and try and swallow the buy and hold pill for several weeks whilst I worked offshore, just as all my merry chums on this forum suggested that I should do.
I bought at $620 about 6 weeks ago. Refusing to take another single hit whilst Bitcoin bobbed around sub $600, I held. Afterall, Buy and hold is a tactic! As the baseline of the descending triangle was broken through, I decided to sell at $545. Bitstamp website fucked up my sell order however, so I took it as a 'sign', that I should hold. But the dumps kept on coming so I market sold at $535, cementing another $1500+ loss.
Perhaps my purest experiment in 'buy n hold' is with Litecoin. I initially bought at $11, sold at $41. Then with my profits, I bought at $37 and have held ever since. Litecoin is now worth 10* less than what I ploughed into it. I never intended to deploy a 'buy n hold' strategy with Litecoin, I just didn't care about it for some fucking mysterious reason. That will be another $1500 I can add to my 2014 crypto losses. A similar story can be told with Quark, except that Quark was a pure loss as I never made any profit in Quark ever and bought at 50% level from the very top in Dec 2013.
My suspicion is that we have had our crypto craze and now all the wild exuberant hype that has been factored into the price, will be steadily deflated from the market as speculators start to realise that the mania has died down, resulting in bounces that repeatedly fail to turn the bear trend technicals on their heads, resulting in increasing volumes of investment capital leaving Bitcoin, resulting in it being increasingly harder for investors to take profit out of the market, resulting in ever more capital leaving the market, resulting in steadily declining prices. As an example, I have gradually went from swishing ~$25K around in Bitcoin, to having finally withdrawn my last $7K (I never lost $18K, but have been winding down exposure gradually, in addition to losing probably around $5K-$7K) from Bitstamp back to the safety of my bank account. I now represent $0 of the Bitcoin market. As the recessive nature of the Bitcoin market ensures that there increasingly more losers than winners, there will be more and more people like me with my psychological stance towards Bitcoin, both with deep pockets as well as with shallow pockets.
If you follow Elliot Wave theory, and believe that we are in a Primary corrective Wave 4 at the moment, then Bitcoin is projected to hit $200 range sometime between now and Dec 2014. It might not do this. Perhaps some world event that somehow causes a panic flight into Bitcoin or some fairy godfather multi billion dollar hedge fund will start piling into Bitcoin with purchases on all the big exchanges. But this is the sort of thing that will be required to truly turn the inevitable and time tested post bubble market sentiment around.
If you can bare it, I would suggest that Bitcoin definitely has a future beyond this corrective Wave 4 which I believe we are in. It is up to you to decide upon what you think is the logical state of market sentiment right now.
Even amongst the most rampant bulls on this site, I am seeing signs of self delusion. I refer specifically to rpteilia's 'calling the bottom' thread (the bottom was $500). I read that and though to myself "this guy is shitting himself".
Another good example would be Ibian (net bagholder since $800) who upon hearing of the Bitcoin ETF that is to start trading out of the Channel Islands from Sept 2014, stated (and I paraphrase);
"
oh man, this sucks, Bitcoin is away to take off man and I can't get any fresh funds to the exchange man and this means that I am going to totally miss out on the price explosion that is definitely going to happen man!"
That should have been a warning sign for me to sell at a small loss, but I never acted and suffered a large loss.
As for bottoms, I would suggest that the big hammer bar on the 4hr chart that took as down to $440 is as good as a reversal sign as you are going to get. Watch Bitcoin closely. I suspect it could get up to around $520 before bounce momentum runs out. Perhaps higher, who knows. If your outlook is bearish, then you shouldn't have any problems recognising when the momentum is about to run out on the retest of whatever 'high' it produces in the first instance. Look for negative divergences in peaks on RSI, OBV, etc on 4hr chart.
