I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.
-Warren Buffet
This quote is constantly bandied about as justification to invest in Bitcoin, and especially now that there has been some nice price movement in the upward direction. But this Warren Buffet quote is only relevant with the proper context, which is that Warren Buffet only invests in things he has a fundamental understanding of and can quantifiably value. You can confidently be greedy when others are fearful if you have a sound investment thesis and are a fundamental value investor. This is how he turns his investments into home runs, he knows what he's buying and what it's worth and can weather the negative sentiment until the market learns what he already knows. This doesn't apply at all to a speculative investment like crypto. Following this advice willy-nilly is gonna get you burned because you're misunderstanding the intent and the application.
Don't not buy Bitcoin if that's what you want to do, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're following Warren Buffet's advice. Warren Buffet doesn't speculate, and if you're buying crypto, you're speculating.
Keep in mind, the price is what you pay, and value is what you get—pay too high a price and returns are decimated. To elaborate on this, the value of a stock is relative to the amount of earnings it will generate over the life of its business. In particular, this value is determined by discounting all future cash flows back to a present value, an intrinsic value. Pay too high a price and the return that arises as a stock gravitates back to its intrinsic value over time will erode. Act greedy when others are fearful and reap enhanced returns, under the right set of circumstances: predictability must be present, and short-term events that create the subsequent downgrade in prices must not be moat-eroding.
Quite right. This is essentially the problem with applying any kind of traditional investment thesis to crypto: it has no intrinsic value because it doesn't have cash flow or produce income. So there's nothing to base the value off of when there's no intrinsic value, and all valuations are arbitrary and speculative.
I don’t know why this sentence can’t be applied to bitcoin. The fact that Buffet said it, doesn’t make him the exclusive owner of the sentence. Also, the fact that Buffet doesn’t buy bitcoin doesn’t mean it can’t be applied to bitcoin either.
He doesn’t understand high tech companies and the sentence can be applied to them.
Buffet is the best traditional investor but the world is constantly changing, and at a fast pace nowadays.
If you have done your research and you buy an asset because you strongly believe it has good fundamentals, that sentence applies. It doesn’t matter if you buy bitcoin, google shares or KO shares: when everyone is scared and selling, buy; and when everyone is so very happy about the investment because it goes up non-stop, sell.
See the explanation above. This is why Warren Buffet's quote can't be applied to crypto. Because when he says something like this, it takes as a given that you have a sound investment thesis and are investing based on the fundamentals of the company. Eventually, the market will realize what you already know and will correct the price. This doesn't apply to Bitcoin because there are no fundamentals. Applying this advice in a crypto context is no better than just guessing.