At least no one is saying to buy the dip... Not sure if that is good or bad though.
They are not?
You believe that we are in a falling knife situation?
There are probably several of us who participate in this thread who have engaged in plenty of attempts to catch the falling knife that don't seem to work very well in the short-run, but in the longer run, they have tended to pay off.
Even if we go down from here, as I type, we are still more than 18x up from our largely $250 price floating point from 2015.
Even if the value of the BTC portfolio of many of us is likely less than 18x up, we are still in a not too bad place.
I am still buying the dip... but I am starting to feel a little bit like how I felt in September 2017... remember when the BTC price dropped below $3k, and such price drop seemed to have gone below $3k quite rapidly and beyond expectations.
Gosh, gosh, gosh. $3k possible again, or would a drop below $5k cause a similar feeling as the drop in september 2017?
Yes, the september 2017 dump was UGLY.
Part of my problem on the september 2017 dump was that I had gone on a trip, so when the price dumped, I had pretty much used up all of my funds that was on the exchanges, and I was not able to move funds around .. so I felt kind of trapped. I thought that the subsequent price rise, had allowed me to lessen the likelihood of something like that happening again... but this one could be bringing back those kinds of memories in which I am running out of exchange fiat...
Unfortunately I already got my hands badly cut from the falling knifes. And not much remaining (trading) FIAT anyways.
You are correct that it remains so damned tempting to use up more and more fiat when the price gets stuck in a range for so long (including the price range in which $5,800 seemed to had been the bottom).
I am tempted to set some limit orders for all the remaining or even market buy and forget about Bitcoin for a long while as I did during most of 2014 and 2015. It paid off to be honest.
Sometimes, set it and forget it can be good, and I understand that running out of money can be a bit of a bitch.
Sometimes, just moving out the amounts can be reassuring, just to feel that you have some skin in the game.
Let's say that you are down to your last $1,000. In that case, you could set buy orders of $100 every $250 down (which would be 10 buy orders). that would allow you to have fiat for orders lower than $3k. Even if you have less than $1k, you could still create either smaller amounts or larger increments or both.
Many people have a set amount of money that is in their current funds, and they also may or may not have a cashflow that allows them an amount of possible additional $10 per month or $100 or $1,000 or whatever that amount is that can be plugged into their cashflow expectations.. If the extra money comes at certain days of the month, it can be plugged into the available amounts, and does not need to be used right away, and it should not matter whether the price is up or down, the cashflow amount gets plugged in within a reasonable period of time after it comes available, which of course, such cashflow would less likely to be urgent if the BTC price jumps up $1k from here as compared if BTC prices were to jump down an additional $1k from here.
What can I say, your methodical plan of selling on the way up has proven much more effective than mine.
There is no need for anyone to compete, and surely, sometimes any of us can run out of money or need to reallocate in order that we are prepared for more extreme situations. Of course, one could argue that I bought back way too much BTC in the supra $10k range, but we cannot really be sure if the BTC price is going to continue down or to proceed up.. and the better scenario is merely to attempt to prepare for as much down that seems to be reasonable and even to account for some of the extreme possibilities (which $3k has continuously been within my preparation range, and surely it is going to hurt even more to go a lot further below $3k because that is not as much within my own preparation expectations (even the more extreme scenarios that we know can happen in bitcoinlandia).
I messed all up when I kept reducing the amount of trading until a point where I was trading with less than 5-10% of my total "cold" stash. My trades were not bad overall but what difference did I expect to make with that little proportion?
I understand that peeps have a trading stash and also an overall stash, but personally, I like to consider my trading stash to be a portion of my overall stash.
So for example if I were to own a total of 10 BTC, I might sell 1% of that total for every 10% that the BTC price goes up. So, yeah, maybe I am only selling .1 BTC and seemingly lesser quantity every time that the BTC price goes up 10%. So if the BTC price goes up 100%, maybe i have sold 1BTC, but then my next sell would only be .09BTC, rather than .1BTC, but it seems that I am also buying back BTC and the price never goes directly in one direction. Further, I can keep a decent portion of my BTC in cold storage (or offline) because it seems that I rarely end up selling more than 10% of the total stash.. So, a decent portion of the stash is kept offline, even though the whole portfolio value is used in order to calculate how much I am authorizing myself to sell....
For some reason it works out, and if the totality of the BTC price goes up 1,000%, then it seems that I tend to still retain more than 10% of the stash in bitcoin and perhaps getting up to 10% in fiat. somehow it seems to continue to work out because even when BTC prices went up to $19,666, I still might have had about 88% of the value in BTC.. and maybe 12% in fiat - even though the BTC price had pretty much gone straight up..
The principle on the way down is just to attempt to make sure that you never run out of cash.. which can be tricky, as you already indicated.
weeeee
