Topic: Buy the DIP, and HODL! - page 584. (Read 123018 times)

I believe some of the comments on Twitter are right.

2025, the year we look back, and remember the "good old days" when we had the golden opportunity to buy Bitcoin below $10,000.

I think every investor should optimize their strategy. That's all I'm talking about. Even simple rules like "scale in during accumulation phases and scale out during blow off tops" will give you a huge edge over typical investors, who usually do the exact opposite.

The problem with planning to buy all the way down in a bear market? Most investors end up piling all their capital in long before the bear market is over since they don't recognize how long it can last. It's not just a matter of opportunity cost and badly optimizing capital either. Being in drawdown for multiple years is extremely painful. Many will just capitulate before price recovers (this is why we refer to 2015 and probably now 2020 as capitulations), selling to patient, stronger hands who understand the difference between accumulation and distribution phases.

That's why I strongly advocate at least loosely basing investment strategy around market cycles. Lacking awareness of them is what causes many people to buy high and sell low. I'm thinking as much about investor psychology and the likelihood that someone will capitulate as much as I am about their average entry price.


I've never advocated anything like that. I am only suggesting that an "always buy now" strategy is not optimal in terms of risk vs. reward. Maximizing my long terms BTC holdings is very important to me, and I am just imparting my experience since 2013 regarding the best way to do that.

14 days of Bitcoin trading, the 10% whalecumulators have more, 90% of traders have less.

Liquidating short sellers,



Liquidating margin long buyers,



If you're a pleb like me, buy the dip, and HODL.

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.

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.

We largely ONLY know how far or how deep a BTC price dip is going to be after the fact, and I don't think that it is good to be second-guessing ourselves or to be kicking ourselves over having had been able to buy more lower, blah blah blah..  especially if we bought a lot at $8k and then the price dips to $6k and we buy a lot at $6k, and then the price dips nearly to $3k and we do not have very much money, so we ONLY buy a little bit in the $3ks because we feel that we are running out of money.  Worrying that we could have bought more BTC for lower will either lead to inaction and getting left behind when the BTC price unexpectedly goes up (which happens quite a bit in bitcoinlandia) or putting too much mental energy in trying to study preparing for down and further down rather than meaningfully and adequately preparing for up.. that seems to be why peeps invest in bitcoin in the first place.. ,,, So, largely, we likely going to be much better off financially, psychologically and time managemently to be spending more of our energies preparing for UP rather than preparing for down (even though a bit of preparing for both with an emphasis on preparing for UP does not seem to hurt).  


Of course, people have a tendency to do the opposite of what they should do.

That is part of the reason that no one should be overinvesting into BTC (except maybe on the margins).

BTC investors should set some kind of reasonable and meaningful BTC accumulation target, and then also make sure that their expenses are covered - so that they do not have to dip into their BTC investment, except at a time that is at their completely own choosing. 

If you overinvest, and you do not have your regular expenses and emergency expenses (remember emergency means that you don't necessarily know that it is coming.. but you should still prepare for such) covered, then you will likely end up screwing yourself by having to dip into your BTC investment that is at a time that is NOT of your own choosing.

Of course, I see that the red zone is very small in that graph/chart that you provided above, Wind_FURY.

You have been registered on this forum since mid-2016, so let's take mid-2016 as a projection timeline.

If anyone who got into bitcoin in the mid-2016 timeframe had actually been following some variation of what you are suggesting in this post (which seems to be a combination of buying on dips and DCA), then there would be almost no way that they would actually be unprofitable, even if technically they had made some purchases with the DCA aspect of your suggestion that were higher than the current BTC price.

It's like there was so much passage of time in which BTC prices were lower than our current price that any BTC purchases that were made above our current price end up getting washed out (or averaged out into profitable) by the BTC purchases that ended up getting made below our current price, which your chart also shows a lot of that happening since mid-2016 - even though the whole chart looks kind of flatly inclining upwardly since it goes all the way back to 2011.

I know that in this thread, several members have raised both the question about not really knowing what constitutes a sufficient enough dip, and then also they raise questions about having their BTC profits to end up being less because if they employ some DCA method, then they miss opportunities to buy BTC lower (and more of it) with that same money that they had used to buy BTC higher because they ended up DCA buying rather than really being able to achieve a BIG SCORE with a BIG DIP price.

I would bet that almost all members who have been in BTC for at least 4 years have made some mistakes along the way in which they could describe some "should have" "would have" "could have" situations in which more money would have been made if they had done a, b & c rather than x, y & z.  My experience has been that many folks accumulating and HODLing bitcoin should not be kicking themselves with 20/20 hindsight, but realize that lots of mistakes tend to be made along the way,  and those who strive to learn from their mistakes tend to profit more in the long run and likely to make fewer mistakes by learning to employ the soundest of strategies, which are the buy on dip, dca and HODL strategies... and thinking about the matter, and acting to employ such buying and HODL in meaningful ways continues to be quite profitable in bitcoin even if some members will profit more than others and some will make more mistakes than others.

for people who are familiar with this market it will be easy to immediately apply it but now people buy when the price is high and when the value falls panic is inevitable. even though buying when it falls is very often shown in forums but most people don't believe 

Think about the difference between buying at $15K in January 2018 and buying at $4K in March 2020. Both were arguably part of the same post-2017 bear market, but one would have netted you 3.75x more coins than the other, not to mention a much less painful drawdown.

That's the difference between buying every dip and buying the deepest dips.

Buying in 2014, not understanding at the time how long these bear market cycles can take, taught me to make that distinction.

The red colored parts of the chart are the only times that buying Bitcoin is a loss, but if you buy the dip and dollar cost average, your average-entry-price would be lower, and make your Bitcoin trade as a whole a winner.

Strong-hand-plebs will be the market geniuses of the 6-digit Bitcoin.

actually "buying every dip" strategy makes a lot more sense for a "short term trader" than a long term investor. because an investor can only buy in some dips like the biggest ones (eg. buying in $3k range) and then just hold for months or years whereas the day trader has to buy each time there is a dip, that is the definition of a short term trader and that is exactly why it is a lot harder than the other strategy.

what is important is choosing what you call a "dip" and when to buy and when to sell. for example during a bear market when the price is going down (since it was mentioned) the dips are the sudden drops that create what i call "reverse bubbles" and are immediately followed by a recovery.
take 2017 bubble burst for instance. there was many drops but the most obvious one i think was the drop down to $11100 which was followed by the recovery to $15k-ish which continued rising up to $16500. with $11k being the "dip" for the day trader and the recovery to anything above it being the sell opportunity.

Zoom out. Bitcoin's bear markets, with the deepest dips, were clearly the best golden opportunities the market will give us plebs before Bitcoin resumes the path to 6 digits.

Some friends and I in the Tradingview chat always used to joke about this during the 2014 bear market. Someone would say, "Buy the dip!" and then everyone would chime in, "Which dip?"

The only time I buy every dip (down to the 1-minute chart) is during a bubble, like 2017. Otherwise I only think of dip buying in terms of mid term (months) and long term (years).

Because you want quick profits, not,



Good luck to your trades, but I believe you aim small.


Zoom out,



The probability is VERY HIGH.

Buying every dip is like punishment for me and I do not see it as a opportunity, I respect the perspective of other people about the price of bitcoin but for me it is really not good a strategy to buy every dip. I think the reason why I do not see it as an opportunity is because we have different trading profile. I do not do HODL because I'm a short term trader and that is why buying every dip is not good strategy for me.

Buying at dip with certain criteria is good especially when it comes to bounce play setup where you will buy in a dip and wait a short period of time to bounce the price then you will sell it immediately because it is a counter trend strategy where the price may go cheap. I avoid trade that is against the trend because the probability of winning is too low. 

I believe the world will be infested by mutated rats, that ordinary rat poison will NOT kill them. We will need something more powerful. Buy them while they're cheap, don't FOMO.

The "strategy", I call it a philosophy, will never apply to a person if his/her goal/plan is not,



That's OK, Bitcoin might not be a first choice for everyone.

The strategy applies to anyone who is wiling, ready and able to employ it, whether he has an extra $10k per month or an extra $5 per month.

Of course, bitcoin is not going to remove all of the advantages that the rich have over the poor, even though it could advantage the ones who are willing to study bitcoin and to figure out that bitcoin is an assymetric bet... no guarantees, of course.

Regarding cashing out strategy that is for each investor to figure out for himself/herself.

Whether buying / selling or HODLing, which also could be described as as strategy to accumulate, maintain or to liquidate (or some variation), the investor needs to consider all of his/her own particulars which would include cashflow, other investments, view of bitcoin as compared with other investments, risk tolerance, timeline and time, skills and abilities to research, learn, plan and tweak plans and holdings and strategies from time to time, including deciding whether or not to trade.  Those are all discretionary matters that are going to vary from individual but also can take a certain amount of attentiveness to figure them out.

This strategy doesn't apply for all traders, what if a certain trader doesn't have enough capital? Do you think he can buy every dips or what they called averaging down?  Of course not. Even if it is a strategy it doesn't mean that you can guarantee yourself to earn from it just because you buy at dip and hold. We should consider the time after all, are we going to hold it for the rest of our lives or are we going to sell it in short period of time.

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