I'm very disheartened today. Lost a major chunk of my bitcoin holdings (almost 0.38 BTC) on Bitmex even though I've been longing since $8000 with just 4x leverage (adding more & more after every dump to average it further down), but still at $6140, I got liquidated. With this, I can pretty much assure that $6140 was actually the bottom. It was only to liquidate me, hard luck. Don't comment that I need to risk only what I can afford to lose, I know that very well, just had some real bad luck (as well as confusion) this time.
For reasons like this, I continue to conclude (personally) that leveraging is not necessary, especially in bitcoin. In bitcoin we are lucky to experience outrageously stupendous returns, and I we do not need to leverage in order to achieve such outrageously stupendous returns on our investment.
Accordingly, if you just invest regularly, then the most that you can lose is 100% of what you put in - but if you employ leverage (especially using the margin trade vehicles supplied by exchanges), you not only can lose your 100% more quickly, you also lose it way faster, which causes a kind of magnification that if you employ 4x leverage than you can lose 400% - something like that. Therefore, I still consider
any kind of leveraging to be too far into a "gambling" rather than "investing" category, especially with bitcoin.
That's exactly what I'd like to conclude. It's a total gamble, and I'd not suggest anyone anymore to be a part of leveraging at BitMex. I still can't believe how easily I lost it all just because of a dump which is not even visible on CoinMarketCap (I'd repeat that again - I'm 100% sure & confident that I got liquidated right at the bottom which was $6140). Moreover, when I was about to get liquidated at $6140, I tried to increase the margin further with a little bit of more BTC (which would've increased the liquidation level to $6050 instead of $6140 and I'd have been saved from being liquidated), but effing system of BitMex gave me an error (system overload, try again later). It's not easy for me to just invest more into bitcoin when I've my whole family to support, my education bills to pay and all other hell. It's surely going to take a while to recover from the two recent losses of BitMex and DENT at CoinRail (I highly doubt that I'll get the DENT back from CoinRail, even though they've been telling me to calm down).
A recap:
-Sold my GPT websites network for 919 bitcoins in 2011, used bitcoin as "just another" payment processor. Started
saving the dollars at LibertyReserve.com.
-Lost every penny of
savings at LibertyReserve.com (this is when I realized that bitcoin could be the future after reading an article at CoinDesk).
-Bought a huge bag of ZCL from my
savings in mid-2017 thinking it has gone down by 70%, and can't go further down, but it continued its decline.
-Shilled ZCL in almost all 2017. Gave idea of Bitcoin Private to Rhett, but he said it's "worthless" and he's going to abandon the project of ZCL. I could've developed BTCP on my own if it wasn't for integration of stupid two way replay protection. Sold all ZCL in November at $2 each due to fear of getting it de-listed from Bittrex (as there was no trading volume present). He then introduced my idea of BTCP in December and ZCL skyrocketed to $200. Now John McAfee shills BTCP all the time.
All of this can be considered as a proof that I got my savings liquidated right at the bottom and we won't see bitcoin below $6100 again.Nice words tweeted by Vinny Lingham:
Your situation (and luck) comes off quite a bit worse than even I had anticipated.
I think that in the last year or more Vinny Lingham has lost a lot of credibility in the bitcoin space, and I would take, even his pessimistic statement that you provided, with a BIG ASS grain of salt.
Throughout most of my adult life, I have been considerably conservative with my finances, so perhaps I am the wrong person to be commenting on the topic, and surely, when I started investing (around 30 years ago), there was no 24/7 individually flexible investment like bitcoin (or some of the other crypto options and temptations).
Anyhow, i personally believe that each of us should attempt to build our base through strategy and systematic application of ideas. Surely, when we are younger we can afford to gamble with some of our investment, but who the fuck wants to be digging themselves out of a hole, if he does not gamble correctly, and for that reason, I have never been much of a gambler.
So, yeah, I agree that largely, it takes money to make money, so if you do not have money you have to build a base upon which you can increasingly raise the stakes of your investment and or your ability to tolerate some kind of reasonable and safe leveraging strategy. If you end up losing your base, then in my thinking that means that you were risking too much in your plays.. And, if you lose your base, then that means that you have to get back to building your base, rather than resuming with double down gambling. So, to the extent that any gambling is occurring with any of your capital, that should be coming from fringe money rather than with either your central investing money and certainly not from your principle or your base that you have either built or are in the process of building.
It tends to take a long time to build a base, and you cannot really rush such building, even though sometimes if you employ solid investment principles, then you could get lucky to be in a good place to get luck and to have some lucky breaks that allow for faster building of a base.
