For those who bought and sold at the right time... but that's true for any investment. Most did not succeed in that. The herd started to buy when BTC was already too expensive and continued till $19,000 and then they took the dive to $6,000. So, for the mass, it was not a success, rather a "sucksess". I know some people who made money in the stockmarket and in real estate, but I don't know anybody who made money, and surely not a killing, in BTC. Some got almost killed. From the top BTC lost in 1 year 70% of his "value". There has been a lot of manipulation to pump up the price: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulation.html Already in 2013 the manipulation was the cause why BTC went from $150 to $1,000 in less than 2 months. This was explained in detail in a paper from a collaboration between Berglas School of Economics in Israel and Tandy SChool of Computer Science The University of Tulsa. Paper is added.
What I'm saying now is the same as what I've said all along. If you need to put a label on it to validate what I'm saying, then that's fine with me.
Errrr, no. A good portion of this thread has worked around this post of yours: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...hope-greed-and-stupidity.326851/#post-4757101 which is now 180° from where you are now. Not every post/thread is going to hit on being 1) clear 2) correct, and 3) consistent but Jeeez, shouldn't we at least aspire to such a thing? Words -- your "labels" -- count. (Unless they don't?) "Yeahhhhhh."
I screwed up because I did not explicitly state that demand for gold and silver also needed to be present along with the limited supply for there to be dramatically increased value above and beyond metals that basically have much greater supply. I thought that the fact that there's constant demand for precious metals was automatically assumed by you guys, but clearly for you it wasn't. Again, that was my mistake for not being more clear.
Cryptos just need to mature, a few major ones will thrive and many of the rest will fade away in one way or another. Cryptos are in the beta stage and I for one want my money to be in stable and hopefully well tested.
This is what makes me wary of crypto posession: I don't know of a way to simply buy it and store it and keep it with a record where I have proof of ownership and some sleuth who is way more hacker savvy than me doesn't slip it away undetected and untraceable. So for me it's the old risk vs reward equation.
I know many people that feel exactly the same as you just stated. Even though it is not difficult to buy and secure BTC, the process is still is intimidating to a lot of very smart people. Once the ETFs are approved so that the regular mutual fund crowd can participate in the same manner as buying any other ETF .... then you have a new ballgame.
Look dude, I think you are mixing the fundamental reason for a market (aka people exchange goods) with your own made up arguments. I'm buying and selling crypto on a daily basis and I'm making good money with it. At the same time I can guarantee you that 90% of all the people who dabble in the stock market lose money, even when there is a historical bull run. So your argument is completely void. You need to decide weither you want to view the markets from a professional or from a gamblers point of view. If you are professional you are in there for the money and you want to have the most idiots and the least competition to trade against. In this case I prefer crypto over anything else. I'd be stupid to compete against the entire wallstreet for the pennies of the 401k investors or even worse to go 1on1 in treasury futures or the GE, since there is no stupid money involved. If you are an investor (or HODLer) or a retail trader (aka gambler) it doesn't really matter were you go, you lose in every market. The only thing you can decide is how fast you want to burn your money. If you like it slow seasoned with a glimmer of hope, you go with equities. You make a little bit after you entered top tick in a bull run and you lose all plus some during crashes like 2008. IF you like it a little faster, you can trade futures or FX. If you are a masochist, trade cryptos and if you just want to see how fast you can lose your shirt, you go with binary options. But it is important that you consider those two points of view. Professional and gambler. The fact that there is counterparty risk and crappy infrastructure keeps the sharks away. Sure, there are a handfull of HFT's, but they don't do much and there's still plenty of filling in the turkey. Once you get the market sorted out in a way that mom and pop can sue someone when they lost money due to their own stupid mistakes, sharks have taken over and there is nothing to be made untill you've grown so large that you can make a decent living with 20% p.a.
Oh, sorry, did see your post after writing my wall of text to the swiss guy So what I'm trying to say is this. When you look at equities, what do you "actually" see? People like to argue that these are shares or pieces of a company that backs their value. I only see a figure on the screen of my trading station or in my brokerage account. I buy something and then there is a price that changes. Can I go to the shareholder meeting and make an impact with my 20.000 pieces? Theres probably no S&P500 company where I can. Am I entitled to receive a piece of the cashflow? No I'm not. IF the company pays a dividend, the amount is completly arbitrary and of course the leftovers after the leeches paid their hermes ties and cigars. Can I have a look into the books in order to see if the company is run properly? (And by books I'm talking about the actual books and not the cooked up accounting sheet that is published) No I can't So the only thing I can do is buy something I know nothing about because I believe the other guys who said the company is alright (analysts and audit guys) and hope the price goes up. That's a stock investor. If you want to trade equities, which means you are looking for an edge in the market that you can exploit, here's the other part of the spectrum. You have an account at TD Ameritrade and you look at the "realtime" datafeed. I'm using quotation marks because the feed is not realtime and you also cannot see the entire market, just a few selected books. Upon that patchy information you decide to buy a stock, because the indicators on your CashGrave3000 frontend said so. Before your order gets routed to the market it is offered to a bunch of HFT guys who can decide if they want to trade against you. If they do, you know your execution is trash and if they don't...well you're not getting a fill. You get executed so you see your 5000 stocks in your account. In reality, however, your broker lends your stocks to a short seller and gets paid a nice fee for shares that don't belong to him. Thank god you just pay 4.99$ per ticket in fees. Because you don't want that clown fiesta anymore, you decide to get direct access. You find a brokerage that offers you Sterling or Lightspeed for 150$+/month, but market data is not included. Once you start ticking the boxes you realise that its more than 700$ for all the different ECNs and then you don't even have access to all the venues because your broker doesn't offer them. So you sit there with your ridiculous overhead and watch your stock tanking to your desired exit price. After you spend hours figuring out weither you should use NQBXMPLA or PLOTMID as a route, you decide to post via EDGX because the book is thin there. You jump a little as you see the bids getting hammered with huge size. You have just 4000 shares in front of you and people are just unloading stock....just not in the lit market. The fund manager who is liquidating is using XOSP, a venue you unfortunately have no access to since it's JPM's darkpool - invitation only, of course. Sorry dude, trading equities is alright as long as you focus on microcaps and even that doesn't scale to well. Battling it out with Knight was fun for a couple of years, but how often is this crappy market hot enough that you can really have a five figure month? In cryptos you can do everything the big guys can do and you don't need an eagle for anything. Margin lending? Go ahead. Market making? Go ahead. Cash and carry, stat arb, rebate trading...go ahead. No overhead, no funky licensing. If you are good enough, nobody will slam the door in front of you just because you don't have the money or the license to operate. In exchange you risk that the exchange you trade on blows up, gets hacked or runs away with your money. But if you are not an idiot, you can mitigate that risk.