Nobody is saying the exact bottom can be predicted. I'm saying that market cycles exist, and they are to a certain degree predictable, even if exact price targets are not. As opposed to "buy every dip, all the time, no matter what," which I think most investors can do better than.
I would absolutely be kicking myself if I had bought and held in early 2018, knowing what I knew from the 2013 cycle. Buying and holding directly after a bubble pop is not only pissing away capital but it's painful as hell.
Well, I bought all the way down from the late 2013 top of $1,163 to the early 2015 bottom of $158 (my highest buy on local bitcoins was $1,200 when I first got into bitcoin and my lowest buy was around $180 - not very much because I was running out of cash), and there ended up being another bottom in 2015 of around $198 in August/September, I believe. I am thinking that my lowest buys in that mid to late 2015 time frame mostly were in the $220 to $240 price arena.
I just don't see how anyone can really know that the BTC price is going to continue to go down when in the middle of the matter.. so I did not really have regrets for buying at various BTC price locations that ended up being higher than where the price ended up going at later dates. I recall making quite a few buys in the $380-ish price arena in late 2014 because I was feeling pretty damned sure that the bottom was in, even though, overall with all of the purchases along the path down, it took more than a couple of years for my BTC holdings to mostly transition into a pretty much break even territory.. and maybe even close to three years before my BTC holdings became largely unambiguously "in profits."
In 2014 while the BTC price was continuing to drop throughout the year, I had considered myself to be in a BTC accumulation phase, but then once 2015 came, I was starting to feel as if I had largely accumulated enough BTC, so I started to feel that I was mostly in a DCA maintenance stage.. maybe not complete categories, but ballpark descriptions of my mindset and my then strategies ( that I thought were pretty damned well thought through), and maybe you are now going to assert that I am rationalizing my past and I could have done a whole hell of a lot better and I should have known better about the price was going t drop more and more and there was plenty of evidence that the BTC price was going to drop and you could assert a lot of blah blah blah..
And, surely, I could look at what I did "after the fact" and see various price points where I could have employed some better strategies, but I also think that such Monday morning quarterbacking is very unrealistic in terms of figuring out what to do while in the middle of the situation and the upside and downside insurance.. mostly upside preparations by continuing to DCA buy BTC in the 2015/2016 period and feel a decent amount of confidence in the then BTC fundamentals (even though continued perceptions of risk).. and I also think that I did way the fuck better than a lot of people who I saw enter and leave and sell back lower than they bought or some other nonsense and folks who were ongoingly ambivalent, scared and engaging in way more emotional transactions in response to the whole situation than I was.. and ended up cashing out at any small fiat dollar profit as soon as their portfolios became profitable.. and I was not even feeling very worried.. even though my portfolio was negative for long periods.. even though the value invested kept going up, but there was also some kind of assurance that I never felt that I needed to cash out any BTC because my dollar cash flow and expenses continued to be covered by my continuing to invest only with extra money that I had rather than anything that I might need within 1-6 months for my ongoing expenses.. and even some tight cashflows during several parts of 2015.
Probably we can just agree to disagree on this point about whether an investor (could do better or could have done better).. even though hypothetically, I do understand a certain amount of wait for a BIGGER dip idea that you seem to be proclaiming to be "better", but any person can end up buying BTC all the way down the downward trajectory of the BTC price for reasons that are based on his whole cashflow situation and ongoing uncertainty about when the bottom is in and how much more (if at all) the price might fall, or not, and in BTC still end up profitable as fuck and even more profitable than a variety of folks who had taken different strategies of trying to time the market and who may have ended up waiting too much and NOT buying and being too nervous.. and like I already mentioned there remains a certain amount of UP insurance that goes into place when you buy, even if there is a lack of clarity of whether more down is coming, when BTC accumulators are buying a lot of the dips along the way and even dollar cost averaging at prices that end up continuing to go down and down and down, in spite of personal projections of the situation and supposed experts that "know better" regarding where the BTC price is going to go.
A considerable number of those purported experts end up being wrong too, even though there might be some price points in which they ended up being write.. but many still might be saying to wait for two digits when the price is in the mid $200s.. and similar bullshit "waiting" assertions are made in modern times, too.. but just at different price points.. wait for $2k or $1k or blah blah blah, and some guys would have been lucky as fuck to get in any time in the $3ks, but they were waiting, waiting and waiting.. we can pick almost any price point and show that sometimes the waiting does not pay off, either.. and ends up being a worse BTC accumulation strategy... even though it sounds good when monday morning quarter backing about various price points that should have been done because the market was clear.. blah blah blah.. and the market is hardly ever clear.. even when there are proclamations that it is, or was.