This is a pretty big question that people in this space have to consider. I personally like to do a bit of both in the sense that I stake the relatively stable tokens, and tend to just hodl the more volatile ones.
Hodling your tokens is definitely less risky than staking your tokens, but in all fairness staking doesn’t really seem like all that risky of an endeavor. Especially, when you consider the fact that a big part of staking just involves hodling your tokens. In fact, many of the risks associated with hodling your tokens are the exact same risks you will be exposed to whilst staking them, and that is the risk of downward price fluctuation.
The biggest additional risk stakers take on relative to hodlers is having their tokens locked into a liquidity pool for a certain period of time.. Usually no longer than a month, but for this extra risk stakers are given pretty decent rewards. Besides if you use a liquid staking DApp like
pStake you could essentially avoid the risk of having your tokens locked up by simply minting a synthetic version of your staked tokens.
The synthetic tokens you mint can be used on DeFi applications just as you would use any other tokens.