Making a plan, being sober, and exercising patience for max gains
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Today has been wild already. Harvest Finance got hacked for $24m (sheeeeesh), BTC whipsawed down from $13,200 to $12,800 and back to $13,000 within hours, $UNI was added to Aave as collateral & here we are on the edge of a face melting bull run.
I’m pumped.
Also, Ethereum maximalists are butthurt that Su Zhu and Light Crypto were saying they are more bullish on BTC than ETH on a recent podcast.
BTC printed a weekly candle close above $13k for the first time in nearly 3 years.
JPMorgan put out a statement expecting a 10x in Bitcoin’s price due to millenials wanting to ‘invest in the alternative currency’.
DeFi coins are in the dumpster.
The markets are volatile.
We’re having a good time.
In today’s piece we will assess maximizing gains in the upcoming bull run, staying sane, having a plan, fighting greed & being aware of market cycles.
LFGGG.
– Andy
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Master It Monday: How to stay sane in the upcoming bull run
Bull markets are absolute madness for all involved. There’s so many different personalities involved and players. New retail investors will FOMO hard, scammers will be rampant and you’ll want to lever up your entire stack near the top.
The promise of getting rich quick becomes so real that you think its only a matter of time before you have your own reasonably sized house. Or a trip to Bali Bali. Maybe a Porsche and a boat too. Oh, and probably a girlfriend.
And right about that time when you are a self proclaimed genius who wants to start his own hedge fund, it all comes crashing down.
Hard.
The top is in.
Hopes and dreams out the window and reality sets back in. You question all your choices, why you didn’t take profits, and what you’ll do to get more money to re-enter the markets.
Only now you’re entering more capital into a 3 year bear market that you’ll want nothing to do with.
Sounds pretty dreadful eh? Yeah. Speaking from experience here, 2017-2018 was an incredible learning experience for me. A young grasshopper in the world of markets, a self-proclaimed genius experiencing my first bubble. We live and we learn. Now we can conquer the markets and make sure we are well positioned to execute properly, because if were right the next 2 years should be absolutely insane.
Market Cycles
All the emotions and happenings I just mentioned are directly from this chart below. I’m sure you have seen this a few times, it shows how the markets move and how feelings & emotions are felt throughout the different prices.
Where are we now with Bitcoin & Ethereum?
What about DeFi?
First lemme preface this by saying, who really knows whats going on in the markets. Its confusing. But if I had to take a guess based off how I’m feeling, we have entered the late stages of hope & early optimism phase over the last week. With Bitcoin closing above $13k on the weekly, and Ethereum holding the major resistance -> support flip at $375, people on Twitter and longing dips & getting excited about the possibility of whats to come.
When DonAlt is bullish, you know its time 😉 However, notice the sentiment isn’t “ENTER ALL CRYPTO MARKETS NEW PARADIGM” rather, bullish but we have some resistance left..
Now, as far as DeFi goes I think were closer to depression. Many coins such as $YFI are down 60%+ from their highs and NO ONE is talking about them or excited anymore. Definitely focused on Bitcoin and regarding what was ‘the future of finance’ a few weeks ago, as a dead market now.
So if were going by the charts, the time to accumulate DeFi tokens is coming soon/now? Maybe. We can’t tell you what to do.
And as far as BTC and ETH goes, it seems like were gearing up for some massive moves up. Again, who knows right?
But thats what I’m currently ~feeling~ and sentiment rarely lies.
Twitter Madness Ahead
So as we enter and go through the remaining stages in the markets, Twitter is going to be insane. There will be endless top callers all the way up, only to turn full blown bull at the actual top (lol). People will throw out ridiculous price targets, and many will be liquidated. We’re against using any leverage for that reason. The name of the game is to remain in the game for as long as you can, getting liquidated screws you.
Take everything you see on Twitter with a grain of salt because everyone has their own agenda & narratives.
Example:
Here we have two different people tweeting about Ethereum with different agendas & timeframes. Totally confusing. Do I hold? Do I buy? Sell?
You’ll go crazy looking at Twitter trying to figure out what everyone is doing.
Stick to your plan (We’ll go over this in a sec).
Now, there will also be a bunch of scammers on Twitter. Here’s 3 general rules:
Do NOT send anyone any crypto EVER – there is no such thing as free money. The next ‘Uniswap airdrop’ is not coming to you. There is no secret trading strategy you can get for 0.1 BTC. No. No. No.
Be aware of phishing emails all around – don’t click any sketchy links & never input your private keys
Avoid DMs with people who want anything from you or are trying to immediately sell you something. Many times they are fake accounts and the people behind them are gnarly. Avoid.
HODL vs. Trading
There are two ways to be successful in the crypto markets from my experience. Well, lets be real there are thousands of ways & strategies to turn profits. On a broad scale all of those strategies fall into the two categories above.
We’ll start with the go-to for many crypto investors and believers: HODL.
Hold On For Dear Life is a meme but it works. This strategy is simply buying Bitcoin & Ethereum and tossing it in cold storage and not selling and not touching. By doing this, you are definitely at a tax advantage & also mentally detached. Usually people employing this strategy are dollar cost averaging into the assets over time & establishing good entries.
We think HODL is the best bet for 90% of people.
Trying to outperform the market is great, until it isn’t.
That’s what trading looks like. There are many forms of trading, day trading, swing trading, scalping etc., they all involve creating a strategy that incorporates your own personal edge. This edge allows you to consistently trade the markets at a profitable rate over a long period of time. A lot of risk management is involved as well as emotional management. There are many great resources on this online.
If you want to try, start with a small amount that you’re willing to lose and get your feet wet.
Again, we recommend HODL & chill rather than adderall & day trade. This goes for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other tokens.
This takes us to the next important concept:
Creating Your Plan While Sober (Now!!)
You might be high, drunk, on stimulants or all the above right now reading this, but you certainly aren’t as high as you’ll be when the markets soar and you’re watching your profits go up significantly. Day after day, week after week, month after month it will be insane.
And you’ll need to be ready.
Here’s how to create your plan:
Open a word doc or some form of note software you can use and access easily
Create 3-5 rules for yourself. Ex: No leverage trading etc etc
Write down what you are holding, how much, what price you entered and the date.
Write down your ideal sell targets for the longer term (BTC & ETH mostly) and how much you want to sell to convert back to USD
Come back each week/month with any changes
Execute
Sounds overly simple and frankly, it won’t be that easy. But if you have your plan outlined before the mania comes, it will be so much easier to execute because you saw this coming and now you just have press buttons on a screen to make it happen. Legit.
You just have to press buttons and be patient.
Greed
The final section of this post is handling greed. Greed is a b*tch. Were all greedy in some way or another, its just amplified when markets are pumping. Greed is when you’re up 5x but you haven’t taken any profits. Greed is when you’ve made more this month than most people do in a year and you don’t realize the gains. Greed is when you start calculating all the things you can do with your gains if they go just ‘a bit’ higher. Greed is turning up the leverage on positions. Greed is not selling anything and proclaiming you’re the greatest investor of our time. Greed is looking at the magical numbers on your screen and taking screenshots to post on Twitter. Its when you tell your friends about how much your making.
Greed is bad.
All of the above indicators of greed are a great time to TAKE PROFIT.
I can’t tell you how many times any of the above things have happened thats indicated markets are at a short / mid term top.
There’s never one indicator that is telling you you’re being greedy, but usually a combination of a few over several days / weeks. Recently in the DeFi craze, I caught myself looking at absolute garbage on Uniswap & that was a huge sign of greed. Unwinding positions is tough, but well worth it.
If Bitcoin goes to $50K+ & Ethereum $2K+ & you don’t take profits…well, that’s greed.
As ol’ chap Warren Buffet says:
“Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy”
Its easy to tell when others are greedy (usually shilling absolute garbage lowcap coins on Twitter & seeing quick 2-5x multiples).
Have a great fookin week degens.
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. At certain points throughout this post, we might get commission for promoting certain projects, if this is the case we will always make sure it is clear. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. We are not professionals or licensed advisors.
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