Hodling is depressing in times like this.... it's my cold wallet that is being brutally hit what concerns me.
Just think about the WinkleVii's or Tim Draper's cold wallet and you'll feel a whole lot better.
I tried. But it doesn't help. Still having more money than you could probably spend (as such whales do) is not that terrible even if your net worth gets a cut of several hundred millions. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think they are as much depressed as I am right now.
I keep repeating it but... If we could act as if that $20K peak never happened (so ridiculously soon) I would be pretty happy right now. That's the only thing that helps for me.
I played this past peak much worse than I did the previous (2013) in which I doubled my Bitcoin count. The blame is on me (or my greed).
P.S.: No, not going to break/sell. I can perfectly (and depressedly) ride this thing until ZERO. I am more worried about the amount of profits already (even if temporarily?) lost than what I still have to lose (which is LESS).
Possibilities seem like this:
1) you did not sell enough on the way up (anyone can kind of feel like that)
2) you sold on the way up, but you bought back too soon, so now you are running out of money to buy (there seems to be a remedy for this, and that is to just budget a plan for on the way down - but of course, if you don't have any money for buying and you don't want to sell any then you just have to HODL, suck it up , and hope to fix the mistake in the future).
3) could be some other possibilities, but I cannot think of them, at this moment.
It's mostly 1, also 2... and for 3 here comes the explanation: In 2013/2014 I had most of my BTC on exchanges for active trading, that let me double my stash in BTC count even if the total value was lower than before the drop. This time I kept reducing my exposure to exchanges.
I am in a similar boat to you, at least in terms of attempting to reduce my exchange exposure, but I believe that I was never trading in such extreme amounts because I could never bear to sell very much of my BTC stash at any one given time. I believe that I went from about a bit over 60% of the value of my BTC investment on various exchanges to about 20-25% of the value of my BTC investment on exchanges. I figured that I could take some of the BTC value off of exchanges while at the same time having enough BTC on the exchanges that allow me to continue to sell up to a certain amount of BTC if the BTC price goes shooting up. Subsequently, I decided that it was not worth my risk to put larger amounts of BTC on exchanges, "in the event that there was some kind of LARGE justification for me to sell a large portion of my BTC quickly). I will admit that around the time of the BCash hardfork, and some of the other uncertainties then in play about how the segwit adoption was going to get implemented, I did allocate a bit of a higher portion of BTC on exchanges because I concluded that some of the pulling of money off exchanges and the possible blockage of deposits and withdrawals for a certain period of time would possibly cause some additional lack of liquidity profitability by having some additional BTC on exchanges.
In the end I was only trading with around 10% of my total stash, and I didn't even sell all of that 10% as I keep doing scalping in a way similar to yours as we have discussed before.
It seems that I am trading less than 10% of my stash, too, but I keep some extra BTC on exchanges that allow me to sell (currently up to $35k) without having to make additional deposits. I am not keeping extra BTC value on exchanges for other currently unknown events, and funny thing that if the total value of BTC goes shooting up, then you end up needing less BTC on exchanges, so it seems to have been largely playing out that way for me... and I discovered that I can still get some of the protections from the BTC volatility downside while selling smaller portions of my total holdings... (maybe the whole situation just rises to the level of NOT wanting to generate too many dollars that I would not know what to do with besides putting back into BTC and my being willing to ride out more of the downside volatility without feeling any kind of need to make great increases to my BTC holdings by selling large amounts of BTC on the way up. In other words, I have found selling relatively smaller amount of BTC to be adequately satisfying.. without any need to get too greedy).
So even if I ended with a 30 or 40% gain in my trading during the drop, that is for only a 10% of my total stash... sooooo a measly 3-4% total gain in coins vs a drop of 65% in price from the ATH... ouch!
I have concluded, for myself, that it is not necessary to become maniacally focused on the amount of profits that I make with each downward volatility as long as I continue to moderately follow a reasonable system that focuses on attempting to stack BTC and insuring myself (somewhat) from extreme possible downward price movements, yet for me the projections of future BTC holdings seem to be working out in a way that I am continuing to add to the stack (and the future projected stack at various price projection points.. It may be unrealistic to consider that the overall holdings will continue to increase or even increase in some kind of 30% to 40% range.. especially if the BTC price doubles or triples or does a 10x or more.
So, yeah, if the goal is to stack BTC then a direct outcome of that kind of goal would be that the overall value of the holdings of both BTC and dollars is going to go down way more in the short term - and especially, like you said when there is something like a 65% BTC price drop (or perhaps more could come)
It's basically that.... I didn't play well this time... But hindsight is 20/20... and I really don't like to have a substantial exposure to exchanges anymore.
So yeah, hodl and suck it up. In the end I will be fine... or not. We will see.
A large majority of us BTC bulls have decent chances of doing quite well with an overall BTC stacking practice, even if there are various points in the short term that we could calculate various ways that we could have made more money or better preserved our overall BTC portfolio value.
Also, if we are not leveraging and only investing what we can afford to lose, then we should not be becoming too emotional about the situation because all of our living expenses are covered, and then the main issue would only be that we are wishing to be more rich, rather than already being rich because we are mostly already living within our means and our bitcoin investment is not distracting us from living within our means.