An investor should have his mind on a long term investment plan, before he venture into investing in bitcoin. He can achieve this by having a bitcoin target as his goal, so that this will keep him more focus and consistent on his bitcoin accumulation. Since he has that on his mind, he will not think of selling when he sees a little profit from the price of bitcoin, because he has not reached his bitcoin target.
But when an investor does not have a bitcoin target and he is just investing, he might be entice by the little profit that he has made in his bitcoin investment and forget that he has plans to go on a long term investment, and he will see the little profit as something big to him, which might make him sell his investment thinking that it will be easy for him to buy back, killing his long term investing goal. This is why we need to set a bitcoin target to help us achieve our long term goal, by hodling and accumulating bitcoin using DCA method, and also lump sum when we have the opportunity to buy at the dip.
this makes a lot of sense to me and I guess part of the issue I was having with relation to
How long is actually long enough to term it Holding is based on the fact that I'm a new investor that doesn't have enough holding and so a little profit in the short term tend to trigger me to wanting to sell it off since there are pressing needs that sometimes makes me feel like if I take back my investment whenever a little profit tops it up, I could use it to solve certain issues and then buy again and Hodl.
Yes.. you are not even close to long term in your thinking about bitcoin and your lack of discipline to hold your bitcoin and continuing to buy on a regular and persistent basis without thinking about either the dollar value or the level of your profits if you happen to be in profits.
You should be trying to think 4-10 years or longer.. and maybe for you think in terms of at least a cycle and a half (that's 6 years) for any new investments that you are making into bitcoin. And if you invest into bitcoin for 6 years, you would end up having some coins that had been bought in the earlier days of your bitcoin investment, so those ones should be more profitable than the ones that you bought later in your BTC investment, but if you had been continuously buying in a DCA manner for 6 years, you still might not be ready to start to cash out any BTC, but you might be in a position to reassess where you are at and where you want to proceed from that point forward.
Maybe right now you should be trying to figure out what you want your timeline to be and perhaps don't invest as much.. because if you want or need the money for other things in the short term, then you should not be putting that money into bitcoin, so if you are putting money into bitcoin that you need or that you want in the short term, such as in the next 6 years, then that means that you are neither budgeting your money correctly and/or you are gambling with whatever money you have..
So for example, if you had been investing $100 per week into bitcoin, maybe you need to lower your amount to $50 per week or something even lower than that in order that you are not worried about whether it is going up, down or sideways.. .sure there is nothing wrong with monitoring it, but you should not be thinking about cashing it out.. that is the whole idea of long term.. remove yourself emotionally from your investment to such a level that you are mostly just focusing on buying and accumulating it in a proportion that is suitable to your budget, your situation and your psychology.. even though it sounds like you have a weak psychology and unable to defer gratification and perhaps an inclination to gamble..
In other words, you likely need to lower the amount that you are investing into BTC to such a low amount that you are not going to be tempted to take profits for the next 4-10 years or longer. Each time you buy more, that new purchase should be presumed to be 4-10 years or longer before you are going to be planning to access it... and surely each of us should have our own number, and I am largely using the range of 4-10 years or longer in order to attempt to be inclusive to a lot of people to focus on a 4 year minimum but also to include the idea that 4 years is the minimum and most of us should be thinking longer than 4 years, but on personal levels we should have some ideas regarding where we want to be at certain points in the future in our lives, but since those times are in the future, we are not going to know with exactness in advance if we are going to actually reach our goals and if we are going to stay on track, so there will always be some need for wiggle room and a range and for readjusting to account for what happens along the way as we go..
But as we've continued to learn from this thread, it's becoming glaringly clear that the most profitable means of investment into bitcoin is a long-term investment and that the DCA strategy is a great toll to enabling enabling us accumulate more bitcoin at our convenience even when our financial strength isn't all that strong.
My own idea of accumulation is that guys should try to be as aggressive as they can without over doing it.. but at the same time, if you have other things that you want to buy, then you should probably keep cash available for those things...so that you don't have to think about your BTC for many years..maybe for you more than 10 years... but yeah you seem to not really understand bitcoin well enough in order to have conviction about it and in order to keep buying and to forget about selling.. you are too focused on dollars and in the belief that you want dollars... which there is nothing wrong with that, but many times (especially with something like bitcoin) you have to be able to build it and to let it ride and it could take a long time.. maybe even 20 years before it has compounded several times..
but then you should be able to measure your bitcoin portfolio building along the way and to adjust your strategy along the way too, even though you admit that currently you are not ready, willing and/or able to engage in building of your bitcoin holdings.. so maybe by nature you are a weak-handed kind of person... and you might not be ready for the big league of king daddy bitcoin, and you need to go fuck around with shitcoins for a while.... and maybe in the meantime, just figure out if there might be some small amount that you might be willing to put into bitcoin and forget about it.. and just continue to build your bitcoin without thinking about its cash value for the next 20 years.. can you even do that? is such as thing even possible with you? . and by the way, the timeline does not even need to be very strict, if you already have self-discipline and you are able to structure what it is that you are trying to achieve so that you can meaningfully measure progress along the way and maybe learn about what it is that you are investing into so that you are no longer acting like such a pussy and unable to build and hold your bitcoin.