Topic: Bought at top, sold at the bottom :-( (?) (Read 3315 times)

you invest on what you think you will do...  you trade on what you think others will do

Well i will disagree i thought it was in a buble and it will correct itself (but at that point i was stupid and i didnt realize that i can take advantage of this, i didnt had trade experience).

When something goes up so much you know theres a buble..., people knew it in april 2013 and then back in 2011 i belive, and i HOPE we will see more and more bitcoin bubbles,  because i will be ready for them! :-) (try to make profit)

I like to use poker, because it is a great analogy to trading. What did you not understand because of my language? In my opinion you cannot know what the future brings. Sure, one can say, to put 100$ in Bitcoin 2010 would have been a smart move. But in 2010 you did not know what will happen. Buying at 1000$ could have been a smart move. Imagine, the price would have gone up steadly to 5000$, than the bubble bursted to 1500$ and then the new level would have been 2000$.

Now you can easily say, that this is not true, but not a few weeks ago!

Please dont use poker terms, not all people play it or gamble online, i didnt get half of your post due to your language :-).

Well when the price was above 1000 i think a lot of people who got into bitcoin early and had some knowlegde about things around them knew it was  in a bubble. and it is due to correction

And it's very overvalued today.

So true. If you call someone's all in with 10J and win against the AA, was this a smart move? If you have only few chips left, and you go all-in with AJ and lose against AK or A10, was this a bad move? No!
The same thing is with prices. Buying at $200 or $1200 and selling at $70 or $500 could be either smart or stupid. In hindsight you are always smarter? When I know, somebody has AA, then it is stupid to go all-in with KK. When I know, the bottom is at 70/500 it is stupid to sell. When I know the price will drop after 200/1200, it is stupid to buy.

But nobody knows!

So it is all about propabilities (and time preferences).

Professional trading is like poker. You make many, many, many trades. You lose, you win, you lose, you win. But in average you win. Maybe 55% of all trades are with profit and 45% not. 

Good luck with a "tight stop" in this market.  If the volatility doesn't shake you out of a good position, this market moves so quick you can expect between 5 and 40% slippage between your stop price and execution price.

it was around $6 after 9/11         

You did well op. Some people here are much less smart than that, and repeatedly do the buy high - sell low cycle. They usually believe that bitcoin is going to drop 10x or more at every dip. They don't learn. We call them bears and feed them, they are rare almost extinct specie.

Which I will agree is much higher than the return has been on $ parked in an index fund since 2000

$103-->$403 is 11% per year on average for anyone wondering.

I would argue that the future value of the money you had from the sale at $71 on 2000 would have been better put to use in other stocks, so maybe it wasn't such a bad thing for you to sell 

Actually no :-), not selling when the price dropped to 70 makes me smart, buying above makes me not stupid or impulsive but a newbie, since i really didnt have experience in trading (like somebody) said and i didnt know that much about "bubles" or "temporaty bubles" :-). But even I with zero trading experience wasnt so "afraid" or stupid to sell so low :-). But on the other hand, i did give into BTC only a small ammount of cash (quite), not all my savings, so i was pretty comfortable even if i loss everyting. On the other hand people who go all in on bitcoin i think that they are stupid, or STUPIDLY HIGHLY RISKY :-).

I don't get it either...seems like it would be smart to put a tight stop on any purchase. If you buy at 250 and it drops 5% on you, then get out and you can always buy back in later.  Some people say it's smarter to watch it go down to 65 and lose 75% of your money but I would disagree with that opinion and "strategy".-----


Well i dont know, but im in for the long run so i dont know how people think who are in for a short term gain. But i think everybody would agree that when you buy at the top (not knowing that IT IS the top and realizing it only when you see the price decling, its worth simply to "hold on" (in a long term at least).

So you are suggesting that the majority of the people who bought high and sold low were just newbies to trading and it was all a panic sell :-)? (in that case the people are almost stupid :-) )

hey i was stupid once, i bought Amazon.com at the peak in 2000 at $103 a share, and panic sold at $71 a month later.  i was stupid cause i didn't hold on.  now it's at $403     

Why do people make stupid threads?

Hindsight is 20/20

I bought at 800 when it had stabilized there for a while late November (and was pretty happy when it went over 1100) and then bought at 725 as it was falling from 1000 after China closed up shop.  There was a little bump in the drop and that's where I bought, figuring it was going back up and a 25% drop was all that was likely to happen.  Well.... not exactly.  I wanted to buy more when it hit 500, but I'm not made of money, and my wife said we'd spent enough already, heh.

I don't get it either...seems like it would be smart to put a tight stop on any purchase. If you buy at 250 and it drops 5% on you, then get out and you can always buy back in later.  Some people say it's smarter to watch it go down to 65 and lose 75% of your money but I would disagree with that opinion and "strategy".

All of my buying in the past month or so averages out to just under $700, so I'm happy. I won't even consider re-selling for a while and when I do so, it'll only be a fraction of my coins that'll go.

In it for the long haul... No panic selling for me!

  could be true.