Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 60. (Read 907248 times)

the castle/manor is nice and has had some good events with bitcoiners, while illiquid it does provide some level of enjoyment from its utilization. unlike say owning some altcoin which is illiquid but also useless.

Great post man!

Liked your castle purchase at the high but very illiquid, think you will have to discount it sharply to get bitcoin below $500.

Maybe better to take a loan out against it ASAP?

Assuming that BTC will always have value the best way to invest is steady buying and through the power of Dollar Cost Averaging (or should I say BTC Cost Averaging?) there will be a good return for the long term investor.

Good, good. It's not like I sold. I am accumulating.

Investing is not about knowing where the price is going. (If you know it, you're a manipulator/controller, not investor.)

Instead of knowing the future, there are probabilities concerning immediate future price development. Those can be calculated from historical price series, etc. and one of them is that selling after a large drop is -EV, (ie. stupid).

If you fail to know these probabilities, you are bound to lose, because you make bad trades.

It is quite simple actually. Like Poker, good players know their things. In each hand, if they have only 2% advantage, they beat the house, and consequently, win.

Bad players not only fail to know their stuff, they even fail to acknowledge their existence. Good luck with that, more money for the knowledgeable ones.

Fundamentally I see no reason whatsoever in selling, so the whole debate is painful. In my understanding, Bitcoin is not any weaker, nor its prospects any worse, now, than when it was $300 some days ago. Or perhaps they are, but the difference in EV is certainly less than the difference in price. Therefore I more likely lean on buying, because
1) BTC is relatively better than before, vis-a-vis the other components in my portfolio (assuming they haven't changed during the drop), and
2) BTCs percentage of the portfolio has declined due to the drop.

Sigh.

What I mean was when there's a panic sell, you can expect a rebound almost for sure. Most people know it but just be too afraid to lose everything or too greedy, thinking they can buy back at lower price soon.

Of course, if they had known at $170 that price would soon stabilize at $210, they could have easily waited. But they did not know it, that is the whole point.

You can correlate the indicator "oversold" with the "probability that you would have gotten a better price later" for interesting results. Yet even my nearest people fall for the trap, or "pro" celebrities (newsletter-writer Jason Hommel selling out of his mining juniors at the week of the market crash in 2008).

Even worse type are the people who sheepishy think "they could buy back lower" when selling to the crash. First of all, they cannot. It is the most -EV time to commit such an act. Second, they don't have the balls to do it, even if lower prices did materialize (which of course does happen at times). It is only panic sell combined with self-deception, and nobody is exempted from the temptation.

Personally, I need to go through a balls-of-titanium exercise weekly, that is a mental exercise with the idea of walking through "how would I feel  if I woke up and saw BTC at $75 (it was $150 some time ago, an unthinkable number ) and what should I do?" It is sometimes advisable to sell a little in the midst of a deep crash, but getting yourself in a position where this actually holds true is almost universally a stupid idea, so it should not apply to you, and definitely does not apply to me.

What's so difficult in understanding that BTC falls in the category of investments that are good and brilliant, and +EV, but with such a high probability that you are in the red either temporarily, or just basically lose it all in the end, that you should only invest with the mindset of "seeing it to the river" (the last card, when the winner is not decided by deception, but by who held the upper hand) ?

Why is it that people who were "happy" with $300 some time ago, now suddenly think that the market can sustain half that price (pushing the air-filled ball twice as deep in the water)?

The forces at work may not react immediately, but they will: absorbing new emission now costs half than what it did; my castle can now be sold for half the price I paid for it (rather easy) instead of full price (rather difficult), to still realize a nice gain in BTC, and the amounts involved are huge in context of BTC marketcap, which is tiny.

To stir the pot even more, is there any offers of odds for the bet: "We will not go to $152 ever again" (one week volume-weighted average in major exchanges) ?  

O.k.... BJA... Maybe I am too sensitive or maybe I am reading your language incorrectly; however, the first sentence of your earlier post, that I have bolded above caused me to believe that you were saying that one more crash is necessary before there is a trend reversal... and I am NOT sure about whether that is the case.  It may be the case that we already witnessed as much capitulation as we are going to get and the volume increased and maybe we are on the way to a bull market.  Maybe such a bull market is NOT going to be without its future ups and downs in the BTC price, but maybe also we are NOT going to witness prices in the below $200 range ever again?  I do NOT claim to know for sure, but I thought that your previous post expressed too much certainty regarding what you were suggesting about the necessity for further BTC price capitulation (and I read as crashing below $200 and potentially further).

I'm not predicting another crash, although it is a possibility. I'm not sure how you inferred that. I think the short-medium term price is likely to rise.

You may be correct about your prediction that there is going to be one more crash; however, I question how you can make such a prediction with such supposed cock-suredness? 

There is NOTHING certain about what is going to happen with BTC prices, and it does NOT matter that there have been crashes in the past and you believe that there is some kind of pattern.  Here, we are dealing with larger volume transactions which may signify that trend reversal has already taken place, and we are getting no more coins below $200. 


The point that I am making here is NOT that I know anything, but I am just criticizing your assertion(s) of certainty, which causes me to believe that you are again talking your book (which you have done so in the past on several occassions). 

I'm afraid that the next bull market will not begin until after we capitulate. This bear market is like a living breathing thing hell bent on getting me to fold and will not stop until I do. It's like it's after me personally.

The hardest part to deal with is that it's my fault. If I had sold more near the top, I could have used the capital to generate additional income so that I could easily and happily be buying more now, not caring if the price goes up or down.

I tell myself that if I survive this bear market I will do it better next time, but that is a big "IF". Now I'm faced with scrounging for additional income in an oil services town with oil prices crashing and everyone getting laid off.

Hard times make some people tougher and other people corpses, but if I'm going down, I'm going down swinging.

A lot of infrastructure is being built up but almost none of it is making money, or finished or useful (now).

Many early adopters and enthusiast are drawing on their Bitcoin savings to fund themselves and these projects.

Furthermore a lot of investment is going into the projects, not Bitcoin.

Etherium as an example sold of about 2/3 of their Bitcoins https://blockchain.info/address/36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2EogxLo2 some of it probably sold of to minimise risk and diversify and some probably to sustain the project.


I think this is a good thing. Bitcoin, thought of as a distributed company, is investing funds into itself. This should bear fruit in future.


However this is just speculation without real analysis. So should be taken with a grain of salt, since everybody has their "theories".


Anyway good on ya Rpietila, its not easy too stay objective and make decisions based on fact when peer pressure and most are against you, wether its political views or Bitcoin price.

Personally I am as confident as ever that the price will come back up, (which is not to say that there is no risk that Bitcoin will fail)

Whether there will be a new lowest or not does not matter. Panic sell is never a good idea cause you could almost always sell later at better price when there's a rebound. Those sold at 170 could easily sell at 210 now, and that's more than 20% difference.

Don't be ignorant, it is simply not done yet, a bounce was expected after the brutal crash and we may trade at this level (max $250) for few more days before the next knife fall.

Not many bears around. Must feel bad to sell at 170, at the most oversold point in history.

Thank you Risto for giving us a plan and helping some of us way to emotional buyers/sellers be prepared for days like this.  Honestly it has saved me so much worry and heartache in the long run.  Sure you may have called the lows a little early but you are right in that if we have a long term plan it doesn't really matter. 

Professional way to invest
- Adjust positions to have portfolio that performs in all scenarios
- Lay back and watch (haven't done a BTC trade in almost a year)
- Adjust when major things happen

Headless chicken way
- Haphazard portfolio allocation based on no analysis nor plan
- Wishing that something would go up instead of accepting whatever comes
- Selling at capitulation, buying at mania.

What harm am I doing and to which group?   

As it hits 140 tomorrow I will remember to think of the shameless shill that only you could come up with

It depends what conversion ratio I get for the castle. They don't move very easily and mine could be appraised to half of what I paid for, or twice that. When I bought it, the plan was "<300 sell it, >3000 repair it, else hold it".

If I get the same that I invested, it's already looking good. More than 3 times increase in bitcoins in one year. (The secondary effect is that BTC price would go to >300 if bought at market).

So let's make it official: I'll sell the "bitcoin castle" to a serious buyer, asking price € 1.1 million, my cost so far.

These kind of things make the rational player conclude that BTC is oversold. If a person in my position needs to buy more, instead of just living with the previous gains, everyone else should be buying already.

Also transactions at an ATH.

The whole 2014 is funny, a year of massive increase/improvement in everything. But price development somewhat sad. Reminds me of 2012.