I still remember when the 2008 bubble burst. I was a small contractor in the new residential building trades. The worst of two other burst bubbles i survived in the trades. I made lemonade out of lemons by switching to property improvement and repair directly for homeowners. No more middleman builders treating RE as a business. But not till after a two year sabbatical where i lost everything except one or two prior associates who helped me into the new niche. So yah, RE investors have to beware of where they are in a cycle, not just what neighborhood they are investing in. So if that's the case, they would be better off just being aware of where they might be in the Bitcoin cycle. Speaking of amazing properties, i once had a chance to spend a day where the owner had bought an actual ancient wooden temple (Buddist or Hindu i can't remember) somewhere in the Orient, had it carefully dismantled, shipped over, and reassembled. Had a chance to walk through it, and the water gardens outside, all alone for an hour. I didn't see any nails holding it together. In addition to that and the main house, the owner had a professionally built tree house, like you'd see on that TV show. It coincided with a day where i felt the most relaxed in my entire life. Unforgettable.
In any business you have cycles (ups and downs). Even in BTC. One personal bad experience can never be a valid argument as it is too rare to make any smart conclusions like you do. I know people who after 2008 made still a fortune in real estate. I also know one who went broke. So the cycles are even different depending on which segment of RE you are active in. And also how capable you are. The fact that you did not become a billionaire from buying BTC, and the fact that your statement is made with hindsight knowledge, confirms that you did not always make the optimal decision. That's reality for ALL people. Almost everybody would like to reverse certain decisions they made in their life. Most people don't know where in the cycle BTC is. If not the world would be filled with crypto billionaires. The same applies for any investment. I am almost sure that investing your money in 2008 in Apple stocks, would have made you more money than in BTC. Fans always refer to the huge returns BTC made before 2017, while the huge majority of them never made that return. So these huge returns are fake as they are non existing for them. They are just hindsight observations. To me only the actual cycle is important as that's the only one you can use. All the rest is wishful thinking.
I lost count of the number of failures in BTC land. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-sec-sues-crypto-firm-145750423.html US regulator sues Beaxy in expanded crypto crackdown, as platform shuts down Others just run away: Bittrex exchange leaving the US
The short answer is that even if you sort of knew the cycles with a high degree of certainty, you (me, anyone) still might not be able to capitalize. To identify the problem you'd have to check out some things i've said in the Spirituality and Religion forum. it has to do with a see-saw, almost a cycle, of self-sabotage then self-promotion then self-sabotage back and forth like the pendulum of a clock ad nauseum. There are steps one could take to ameliorate the down cycles till they are fewer and farther between. The opposite is higher upswings more frequently. Again, this all transpires deep in the human psyche first, and from there, having a better chance to manifest in material ways. I wouldn't call it wishful thinking. It has more to do with self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. From a better position, one could both see a cycle, and capitalize on a cycle. Btw, i was perpetually bullish on BTC a few days after i discovered it round about the yellow highlight in the chart at the top.
Correct. But you should then also read all my previous posts. I wrote years ago already that I had delete all these negative thing out of my brain and re-educate my brain. The human brain is not made for trading. I never read any books on trading and never studied any of the available indicators. The result is that I can open/close positions based on a mathematical system that doesn't care about the human factor. I always initiate trades against the general opinion of the market at that moment. I don't read news,I don't listen to other people, and I (most of the time) just execute what math tells me to do. So: no self-sabotage no self-promotion don't check cycles my systems controls everything and gives me instructions When I started daytrading (around 1992 I think) I was trading Forex, and switched to S&P when it was still at $500 a point, so before ES appeared. My broker called me several times a day to ask my opinion. After a few weeks already I noticed that what I told (which was what my system told) what I should do. But my brain sabotaged me and I did not follow the system. Every evening after the close my broker called me and asked me: why did you not do what you had to do. You would have made a lot of money. He also said then that he did the trades that I should have done. So I knew what to do, but refused to do it, and he made money with my system. I became so angry and it was so painful for me that I decided to clean out my brain and, just like a zombie, to follow the system. That was the best decision that I ever made in my life. I banned human psyche. I don't need self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. I came to the conclusion that I could never beat a mathematical system. All I had to do was to have the discipline to just do what the system tells and surely not to intervene, just execute without even thinking as the system also defined where the stops should be. Good for you. Almost all people that I know got in starting from 2017 or later. If you really believed in it and invested a decent amount, you should have become millionaire by now.
This is a good historical CNBC video on Bitcoin when not many places accepted it and the adoption was low and the price of a bitcoin was $100 Today, the global Bitcoin adoption is amazing and the price of a bitcoin is over $28,000 Within 10 years, the global growth of Bitcoin will be much more than today and the price of a bitcoin will exceed $1M Bitcoin is not a get-rich quick investment Bitcoin is preserve and grow your wealth slowly investment Patience is key. No hurries. There is no time deadline
It's good you were able to overcome it, but you can see, from your own experience how strange it is that you know what to do but find it difficult to execute. You don't think that is self-sabotage? But i do and have several anecdotal stories i could tell that proved it to me in my own experience. And the remedy could be what i call self-promotion, whereby one pulls out every disciplinary trick in the book to overcome some pretty obvious sabotage. I'm looking at the problem from a macro viewpoint, wherein the mere appearance as an air breathing earthling is a manifestation of, and evidence of, self-sabotage. So we've put ourselves in this difficult position, and have to develop tricks to survive, let alone thrive. I call that self-promotion. The problem is the self-sabotage is ongoing, even as the self-promotion fights it. This battle is happening way underneath the brain, beyond common observance. Ideally, something happened on that level that guided you to not listen to anybody and come up with a mathematical thing that nobody else does, or has thought of, to ease your situation. If not, then the brain-brought solution might just shift the sabotage to some other area of your life. So maybe now there is no problem with finances, but then health problems creep in. The universal sense of guilt, which fuels the blame game, needs to be short circuited through self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. I don't mean the earthling self. I mean the Self which abdicated its own existence, and denied its normal experience, in exchange for something so small, limited, changeable, poor, ignorant, divided, and vulnerable. In this case, the solution isn't necessarily cash, but rather, escape from the situation through full Self-acceptance. So my approach has been two-pronged, attempting to affect the macro picture, as well remedy the most immediate problem pressing down, the problem of petty cash flow stealing one's entire time, and distracting one's attention from the most important factors we must deal with. That and other distractions. Maybe I've had some effect, or maybe I've come up with a brain-brought solution, but i now have a method because I too stopped listening to so much noise and followed a hunch that popped into my attention two or three years ago. It's vague because i have been distracted, and have wasted a lot of time, continuing with some residual self-sabotage, since coming up with, refining, and proving the method. My approach, like yours, doesn't check cycles, and just tells me what to do. And especially, no f^%4ing "support" and "resistance" zones! But will i do it? There came a time in the 2014 bear when i said to my self i would endeavor to obtain twelve bitcoin, feeling as though that would solve retirement issues sooner than later. Twice the opportunity landed in my hands, once when BTC was at $200, and again when BTC was at $14k. Yes, i had $167k worth of crypto on January 15, 2018, representing a 33x improvement on my investments. Right before self-sabotage took the upper hand, again. I had yet to pave a clear trading path to take profits, to sit out, or go short...yet. Seeing this as the problem, i really resolved to get out of cycle prediction, and get into a neither bullish nor bearish opinion, and concentrate on merely following some indication of shorter-term directional moves. The seminal idea is simply this: What is an indicator? Why do people use indicators to filter other trades? I thought, well, unless the indicator itself makes at least some reliable probability of profit, how could it possibly be useful to guide other trades? What we need is an equity curve that always goes higher, but with less volatility than new technology like BTC. We have to start with an equity curve with reasonable drawdowns that we can actually work with, even if the overall yearly gain might not be all that high. THAT is the job of an INDICATOR. After that, our job is to trade our own f*&$ing equity curve! So again, what is an indicator? An indicator is something that monitors the noise in the market AT ALL TIMES, and by indicating when to reverse, converts the unmanageable swings of the base market to something more manageable called your own f%$#ing equity curve. I mean, have you ever heard of anybody using a moving average just on Mondays and Wednesdays, or just on longs but not on shorts? No, so the task at hand is to find something, anything!, that is constantly either long or short (always "in"), which can ameliorate the volatility in the markets by reducing drawdowns while maintaining a generally upwardly mobile equity curve. To find that anything, i just stopped listening to people and followed my own hunch. I gravitated toward price action and started research on engulfing candles and worked my way out from there. The thesis is that if it's not possible to stay in the market, either long or short, and make even a little bit of profit over time, then technically, it's not possible at all. Otherwise, stop losses and targets make no sense. In an always in method, the reversal point is its own target, and its own stop loss. The thesis further theorizes that if you then only take "trades" in the same direction of the "indicator" (which is always in, building its own equity curve), one should be able to yield a significantly higher profit factor. A lot of the time I "wasted" was proving to myself that this is true. Then, if your drawdowns are still too much for comfort, then handle as many uncorrelated instruments as one can, in the shortest time frame one can justify, for the portfolio effect. So, where is this reversal point? It's kind of confidential right now because it seems like an original idea that i have spent years of pain and labor paying for. But i think anyone, forced at gunpoint, could find something. To me, it is worth more than a mere twelve BTC. Find it and you will find peace knowing you don't have to listen to so much noise about trading anymore.
When I look at the history of reserve currencies, as shown below, it's not so incredibly stable that the U.S. should be antagonizing countries with its foreign policy. What's the saying, slowly at first, then all at once?
Using your equity curve as an indicator is the same as any other indicator. The market moves the indicator. I guess I come close to doing that. (Trading an equity curve) I'm a long only investor. I buy what is going up, and hold until trend changes. (I suppose you could reverse this and short what is falling) Rule number one is capital protection. Rule number two is not to hold losers in the portfolio. My equity curve trends up.
Thats good. Nothing wrong with only long if the base market, or base time frame, is in a raging bull, or generally goes up, like the stock market, or has been tested to not yield enough for shorts. I wouldnt call the resultant equity curve an indicator though. The indicator produces the first equity curve, which is like another "market", or another member of a portfolio, which is a little more manageable. From there, you can run other indicators, like statistics, or even a moving average, on your own equity curve, and only take longs if that's what works. But you can then start buying the dips, so-to-speak, if the drawdowns are first tamed.