I'm not a native speaker so be easy on me writing my story :). Anyway I'd love to share my story to you experienced or new crypto investors and fellow redditors!
My story started around September 2017. I was in my 2nd year of college and starting to learn a bit about the stock market etcetera. A guy I met that year who later became a good friend told me about crypto and how it might be interesting. We were talking about bitcoin (obviously) and after some small digging I decided to buy bitcoin on an investment app. Turned out this wasn't the "real" bitcoin but Just a derivative of it's price. I had leverage on it and when it went down after my buy the position closed and I lost all the money. At that point BTC was sitting around 3.000 I believe.
Later that year, around October or November the same friend explained to me how to invest in real currencies and so I opened an account on Bittrex. He had Verge coin and told me I could buy that as well so I put a small position in that one.
Around that same time I believe I joined Reddit and also this subreddit simultaneously. I came to know about other coins and projects such as Nano, NEO, Ethereum and others. I also kinda learned how Blockchain worked and I thought it was really interesting so I bought some more into Ethereum and the other coins. What I did was, and this is very important in my opinion, buy with money that I just accepted I lost. At that point my portfolio with the small verge position started surging. I didn't expect it to go so fast but it did. Like I read from a similar post the guy explained very well. The coins went x2, then another x2 and another and sometimes more. My verge position was multiplied by 18x and it was insane. I somehow sold verge at it's all time high and sold it for Ethereum which I still think was my best call at that time.
The other alts pumped as well and my portfolio went from a really tiny investment in something that became more and more serious. I totally admit this made me greedy as fuck🤦🏼♂️. When you see your portfolio doubling, and a week after it doubles again you start to think: damn this could get serious. Around Christmas it was madness. Bitcoin surged from around 13k to 20k in a matter of days, Ethereum and the alts boomed a few days or weeks after when Bitcoin was stable. Coins where coming out of nowhere and everything went x6 or x8 even. This made me stress out whether to keep the coins on an exchange, sell them or cold store them. I chose the latter.
At some point you started seeing some small dips in the market, some bigger and then up again. My portfolio had reached an all time high at that point and I didn't know it back then. When you see 10% drops you think: aah this'll go up again, no worries. Then it drops 20% and you tell yourself: I won't sell at these prices, it was higher before. It kept going down with some waves of up movement but the trend was definitely going down. Like I said before I considered the money I invested gone so luckily for me there weren't too many emotions involved.
Still at one point around October after 2018 summer my portfolio was down 93% and I was bag holding coins like REQ, ICX, NANO etc. Those took some hard beatings. When this happens you kinda become numb to it. You regret not selling but you also know it's impossible to time your positions. I also went to an event in my town which explained Blockchain and it's use case very well. I thought this was very cool!
Fast forward in 2019 I went to live in another country for my study. I still remember Bitcoin kinda coming back to life at one point and I noticed myself checking it more often again. I believe it even went to 12K and then back again. Sadly when bitcoin pumps alts don't directly go with it and when bitcoin dumps alts dump more. The more this happened the worse alts got beaten up. I never bought bitcoin because I didn't believe in it's user case. I saw it like a big old dinosaur which would go extinct. Still regret that now, hindsight sigh.
Anyway fast forward again and we reached the corona pandemic which made the market tank hugely again. Bitcoin sitting around 3k before going up again. I regret it but I never really added to my position because in times like that you really think: this is too risky, it might never go up again.
Since the corona pandemic I had more time and I checked the subreddit and my portfolio more often. I even logged into my exchange account again which I didn't do in 2 years. Lots of things going on as everything started climbing again. As I logged in I noticed my coins I was bag holding. I converted them all to Ethereum which was sitting at 540 at that time. Not a bad thing looking back now.
Now we're here today and I personally still haven't reached that 2017 all time high. It's just because I bought into some altcoins around their all time high and they never really recovered again. Also because I never dollar cost averaged on my 2017-2018 position.
These few years have definitely taught me a lot though. My lessons I've learned are:
• Don't invest more than you are willing to lose
• Consider the money gone to prevent emotional actions or trading.
• Hold on to your positions or make slight adjustments if you see fit.
-Do your own research at coins you're eyeballing (common advice here).
• Don't panic sell.
• DCA (dollar cost average) when possible. Don't invest everything at once.
• Spread risk into multiple projects consider a portion into more stable projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum
• HODL.
-Buy the dip (not like me who didn't do that hahaha)
Anyway if you made it this far, thanks a lot! I hope you enjoyed my tiny story of crypto investment.
Disclaimer; I'm not a financial expert and everything you read is my own personal experience. Do with it as you please :)
TLDR; was able to get big profits but held on and got greedy. Held everything through the 2018, 2019 and 2020 crash and now I'm up again
No comments:
Post a Comment