Topic: Buy the DIP, and HODL! - page 520. (Read 108121 times)

"Good profit" is not/should not be your true goal. The true goal of HODL, in my opinion, is to have a fall back, a back up when the Fed/Central Banks/the State lose control of the monetary system.

Short term profits might matter to you, but I believe that there are a decent number of other people who think about these matters a bit differently, including thinking about bitcoin as a long term investment.

So back in 2015, maybe you bought BTC at $250, but the price kept going up, and you kept selling at various points on the way up, so if you sell too much too soon, then you may have run out of BTC to sell by the time BTC prices reached $3k in August 2017. 

So then you say to yourself that it is o.k. the price will come back down, and so far, the BTC price has not come back down to below $3k.. Yeah, sure you made a lot of profits, and you even made 10x on some of the profits that you had sold closer to $3k, but you still missed out on a lot of additional profits, too.



My personal approach to BTC is to attempt to plan to never run out of BTC to sell and never run out of fiat to buy, so therefore you have to plan accordingly, even when the BTC price has tendencies to have very extreme runs in either price direction. 

Sure, no one can be perfect, but surely there are ways to attempt to plan to be prepared for even the most extreme of extremes.



No matter how much money you have, you should be attempting to buy BTC within your budget and hopefully not risking any money that you cannot afford to lose or that you might need for short term expenses, even emergencies.   So, if you do not have your cashflow in order, then probably you should not be investing in bitcoin.

Of course, any of these kinds of investing matters are going to be easier for people who have built a larger investment portfolio, and frequently it takes time to build a decently large investment portfolio.. but no matter if your investment portfolio is large or small, there tend to be a lot of similar principles - especially if you are attempt to treat bitcoin as a long term investment rather than gambling.

Furthermore, if you have BTC accumulation targets, you likely need to focus more on just regular buying and buying on dips rather than selling any BTC at all... because it may well be very risky to sell any BTC when you have still not met your accumulation targets.

Accumulation targets are something that each person sets for themselves and it is going to vary.   



I doubt that the questions that you proclaim to be on everybody's mind is actually the case, because people vary in terms of how they strategize their investment, and whether they sell any BTC at all, especially if they are accumulating, like I said.

So, sure if your BTC holdings are considerably profitable, then maybe you can shave off some small profits along the way, but shaving off profits along the way can become very problematic, like in the situation that I described above and you end up selling way too many BTC too soon and then you don't get any opportunities to buy them back for lower than you had sold them.. plus you miss out on the opportunity to sell much higher, including selling more than 6x higher than the highest price that you had sold.

So, personally, I would frame the whole matter much differently from the way that you are framing it, Oilacris - because you seem to be much more inclined to engage in risky kinds of behaviors of selling too much of your BTC.. because you are trying to time the top of a wave which is a kind of gambling.


Exactly..

This is what happens to people who are too busy engaging in trying to time the market, rather than really getting their shit together in terms of establishing their BTC accumulation goals and meeting that first... DCA and buy on dips.. and sure maybe play around with a bit of it, but try NOT to run out of money..

Once you meet your BTC accumulation goals (which surely can take a while), then you may well have a bit more freedom.. especially if whatever BTC that you have accumulated is in profits, too.

At the same time, until you are really solid with your BTC accumulation level, you still should not be playing around with trying to time the market, but instead attempt to establish modest plans and practices that prepare you for no matter what direction the BTC price goes and allowing the price to come to you... and including when in doubt buying on dips... (which is the title of this thread.. buying on dips).   

If this is the case I am holding, like what I am doing for a long time now.

If I have no choice to do things I wanted with it, I will just keep on holding. For sure time will come that either buying or selling is the choice so I just need to wait for that time. We really need to take advantage of the opportunities we have.

this is exactly why we keep seeing so many panic moves (a panic sell where price suddenly drops down, or a panic buy where price suddenly jumps up). there are always a decent number of traders who think they can make profit with the trend that has gone up for a certain time in the future too, but then that trend changes and they get confused not knowing what to do next so they panic and increase the volatility instead while losing all the profit they had made to that point.

When you ran out of btc to sell, then what else you can do? as long you do already have sold and in profits then that what matter most for everybody.

What if its going down but you do have ran out of fiat to buy more? Then so be it, everyone does have different level when it comes to financial capacity.Lucky for those who have more but to think
that buying  even more does increase the risk even more.So its still a good call for someone who do buy on minimal but of course when in talks to profit then it would really be always equalled on the
money you had risk.

The real challenge here is on how to determine the right time for you to sell and when to buy.This had been always a question on everybody mind.

What if it keeps going up but does not come back down and you run out of BTC to sell?

What if it keeps going down and you run out of fiat to buy more BTC?

yes, profits can now be made every day because the movement of bitcoin every day can go up and down quickly, if you listen confidently buy when it goes down and sell it after going up. because the difference is quite good and very profitable if it happens several times.

I doubt that this thread is very focused on the selling aspect in regards to your bitcoin strategy...

Look at the title of the thread.

The focus here remains about accumulating bitcoin and how to do it, so sure if you have reached your BTC accumulation goals, then you can start to consider the extent to which selling might fit into your BTC maintenance plans... but seems to me that the focus of this thread remains accumulation rather than maintenance or even taking profits in dollars.

There are a lot of examples in BTC history of folks who either failed to accumulate enough BTC or sold too much too soon.

It's all about buying low and selling high, that is what investing in Crypto market is, you must follow the market prepare funds when there is a dip and set up a plan on what price you are going to sell it, sometimes it takes a lot of time or a long wait before you can sell, but it's worth it as long as the coin you are holding is good you just have to be patient and wait for the right time to sell.

Well, what else can we do? If we saw our coin plunge we should take the opportunity to accumulate and then just HODL it, if it surges then sell. No one will set at a low price though so what's our choice?
The coins I think better on these buy and HODL strategies are the less volatile one like Bitcoin and Ethereum but if it is an altcoin mostly, you won't be needing to HODL I guess, the fact that most of the altcoins are highly volatile.

Thanks exstasie, that largely makes sense to me.

Definitely not much science to it. Statistics and risk management is all we have. The best we can do is back-test our strategies to statistically gauge the win rate any given trade setup yields. Then we can employ an exit strategy that is profitable and, based on our back-testing, consistently attainable.

In my experience, 3:1 or better is a good target to shoot for. That means your win rate can drop below 50% and you will still be profitable. By 3:1 I mean for every 1 unit stop lossed, I am targeting 3 units of take profit.

So if price is trading in the middle of nowhere (far from horizontal support) I avoid entering long positions because my stop losses would need to be very wide, making for a risky trade. It's nice to buy near support. That keeps your stop losses small.

I suppose that there are all kinds of variables in terms of "letting winners run,"  but maybe there are some circumstances that you can identify in which you have pretty decent odds (and therefore high confidence) to "let winners run." 

We also know that the trend tends to be your friend, but that kind of assessment might only get you to 51/49, if you are correct about identifying the true underlying trend that is dominating at the time because sometimes we might be in a long or medium term bull trend, but a short-term bear correction is taking place within that longer or medium term bull trend, and if we had bet on down for the short term.. but we cannot be sure if the correction is going down 5%, 10%, 20% or even greater because the dynamics might change along the way based on additional down momentum that is caused by getting past certain price support points.

I bet that it is quite difficult to have any kind of science in terms of figuring out at what price points to take profits or to attempt to let it ride a bit more even if believing that you understand the pattern that seems to be playing out in the short term.

Buy and hold shouldn't apply to altcoins without  case use, as we have found thousands of these projects without products backed by. Though this with few exemption but before buy anyone ensure it be a good project with prospect. The only assurance with buy and hold should be with Bitcoin and not another(altcoins to be precise). Bitcoin is that coin you can buy at dip and hold for long-term if profit is to be sure but for others I doubt.

80/20 would be crazy. In my opinion, a win rate like that implies a trader is locking in extremely small gains to prevent stop lossing, i.e. not letting winners run. You can't make much money that way.

It differs from strategy to strategy but 60/40 is pretty standard for a good trader. 50/50 is fine too, with proper risk management. If you have a rock solid 50% winning strategy implemented with a 3:1 or better reward:risk system, you should be consistently profitable.

Trading is like a competition, if you compete today and lose then someone will be the winner, and vice versa.
then those who are already deep or have a fair amount of experience are part of the 10% you say.
Like Brazil who won the world cup 5 times, we cannot call it luck because their team play is indeed great.
Likewise with the trading that we do if we always hone your skills then your chances of winning will increase.

Buy and hold are the best investment. On the dip, we are able to buy more within our budget and we are able to hold it. After some days, we will be able to make good profit from it.

I doubt that anyone with any reasonable senses is suggesting any other crypto project (aka shitcoins) to have long term strong fundamentals besides bitcoin, so surely, buying on dips and continuing to buy has to have some level of confidence in the long term fundamentals of the project in such a way that it is likely to recover.  

Of course, there can be recovery based on mere pumpening and manipulation and without fundamentals, yet it would seem quite likely that making those kinds of investments are surely very risky kinds of bets to be relying on mere pumpenings and manipulation and/or weak fundamentals (or misunderstanding the fundamentals in such a way that you conclude that value is there when there is not).


Whole topic of this thread?

Some people bought.  Some people bought a bit when it dropped from $7,500 to supra $6k, and then bought again when it went from $6k to $5k and then bought again when it went from $5k to sub-$4k for just a short while... They had only a few hours on a couple of the days around that time to buy sub $5k, and some of them did it.

Your seeming focus on sellers or holders during such a dip seems to be underplaying the likely BTC commitment that some longer term folks might have towards bitcoin, including a likely understanding that some folks have considered bitcoin fundamentals in such a way that they are not easily shaken, which should cause a decent number of those kinds of folks to buy rather than sell, and of course some will HODL (or do nothing) as you say.  

Sometimes we cannot really read too much into what people do exactly, because some HODLers may have already assessed the bitcoin situation and have determined that they have already acquired enough BTC.. whether that is a certain quantity of BTC or a certain percentage of their investment portfolio... so such people who feel that they have enough BTC may well not consider that they have additional money to buy at the time of such seemingly extreme dip (unclear at the time, but subsequently shown to feel much worse than it ended up being - and would have been a great opportunity to buy, but hard to know with any level of certainty at the time that such seemingly extreme dippening is happening).

Let's say, the above example, the one who bought on the way down, on the first BTC price drop from $7,500 to $6k, some of them blew their whole wadd when the BTC price dropped to $6k and considered $6k as a likely bottom, and sure in the whole scheme of things, BTC prices were only below $6k for about 7 days, at most, but still those 7 days felt like a pretty long ass time for many folks trying to figure out what to do and if they had more money, and can even cause some of them with the greatest of BTC commitments to feel uncertainties if the BTC price is going to continued to drop and if they might need to reconsider what to do, exactly... including subsequently determined to be BAD ideas of selling some or all of their BTC after the price had already dropped that much.



I would not emphasize those people because they are not very common, and it is NOT even a good approach, when it comes to managing your BTC portfolio... so probably more likely to characterize such people, to the extent they exist, as lucky rather than as having had "done it properly."


Yes... surely some people did get emotional during that period... and they did the wrong thing (we found out afterwards - even though we probably should have realized ahead of time that selling on the way down does not tend to be a good idea with bitcoin, generally speaking)..  Many of the sellers on the way down (or at the bottom) may not have realized that they made a mistake until several weeks after BTC got back above $6k and did NOT seem inclined to come back down...

Actually, if you look at the BTC price charts, one month after the dip, when BTC prices got back above $8k, it did not seem to want to go back below $8k  (which was surely a kind of punishment for those who sold some or all of their BTC below that price and failed/refused to buy back)...

Sure, there are no guarantees in BTC, so we could revisit $8k again, but currently, those sub $8k prices for buying in March and April are looking pretty good.


Still stressful for many of them.


That's true... the longer in, the more that HODLers can bear with some of those kinds of great price moves, even though BIG price moves like the one in mid-March likely even causes experienced HODLers some concerns (at around that time, the 200 week moving average was $5,500, and the BTC price dipped down to $3,850).. Historically, the BTC price has not tended to dip below the 200 week moving average, and even in march, that dip was short-lived.

Currently, the 200 week moving average is at about $6,700 - so sure we could get dips down to that level and of course there are no guarantees for either price direction - but still good practices to have some of these kinds of metrics in mind when considering what seems to be more plausible/possible than not.



In any event, whether you are older or younger, it tends to take a long ass time to build investment capital, so younger folks have not had as much time to build their investment portfolios.  Older peeps have had more time to build, and some have actually built and others have engaged in practices in which they have not built.  Younger folks have more time to take more risks and to recover from the risks if they end up screwing up, but there are likely better ways to take risk in order that bets are somewhat hedged.  I would think that people should want to feel as if they have built something by the time that they reach their 30s and 40s.


I cannot disagree with you, and I personally have suggested that each person consider his/her personal factors when engaging in any kind of investment, whether BTC or any other investment(s), and it surely seems that bitcoin provides way more opportunities than have traditionally been available to regular people in terms of how easy it is to get into a BTC investment and even to choose to invest small amounts, such as $1 at a time 24/7/365.  For fees and other purposes, it may be more strategically feasible to lump investments, but there are avenues and options to buy, trade or invest with low amounts on a regular basis - just a matter of learning and creativity in some of the cases - even for very poor people who may have been traditionally excluded from having such options.

Of course, the personal specifics can take quite a while to really figure out and to balance including considering specifics of: cashflow, other investments, view of bitcoin as compared with other investments, timeline, risk tolerance, and time, skills and abilities to learn, plan, carry out and tweak practices from time to time including trading (whether and how), reallocating, etc.

• Few people sold their btc being afraid of the economical crisis for pandemic.
• Most of them sold their coin being panicked.
• Many other sold it to buy again in deep.
• And few other did nothing!

The people who sold it to buy again in deep and have done it properly, was pretty successful with their plan. But I think the panic sellers haven't made good movement. And the investor who haven't did anything, gained nothing & lost nothing. Cause the price recovered quickly.

Bitcoiners who are in the crypto market from so long, have experienced this kind of pump and dump of crypto price many times. By using the experience they can take a better decision than noob bitcoiner.

Younger generation have much self confidence. They can easily realize the crypto market by analysing the price history. But people who have already made good investment portfolio at mid or older age staying ahead.

There are different kind of investor in bitcoin. Everyone won't follow any particular method in their investment plan. So the decision depends on you that how you will deal with those kind of situation.

Theres also the spread cost and quite a few people are paying for leverage because they dont have the capital so they pay to buy or sell BTC they dont actually have.  So to play the game costs more and even those correct are paying the market, the exchanges and I guess the market makers.

I think of that as a flush or flash crash where the depth of the market is exposed because too demand was placed on available orders.   Its not really a crisis especially just a bump or upset.   It means the price at that time was very inaccurate, too much happened too quickly and the full range of people involved with BTC were not part of that price movement.   It happens in main markets too, we get air pockets where the price is weak from excessive volatility and the memory stays within the charts for some time after is the theory.   Usually it means we go back and recheck prices and over greater amounts of time more are involved and we improve confidence.
   In short the people who've seen BTC for years have experienced this before and it'll knock the newer people off their feet a bit, big news events big moves are something of a tax on inexperience.   Markets try to avoid inaccurate prices, its not constructive long term so we hope the market does have trend and confidence to its price accumulation etc.   It can be very profitable speculation though, hence buy the dip but I had no idea that we'd dip that much or where or when it'd stop exactly.