I panic sold at $13.5k and $10.5k.
I bought back 98% of my original position between $6k and $8800 because I was defensively hedging against the upside. So now I have a stack of fiat, a stack of taxes and a wire to buy back the last 2%.
So overall I have done quite well even if I did not get the chance to make the buys I thought I was going to get under $5k and have been left with an increase in fiat and no net increase in BTC. Maybe if I got off my ass and calculated my taxes I could buy back some more, but I need to do that soon.
I can’t model it in my head but intuitively incrementalism ties up a lot of capital that is not particularly doing anything even if it helps you sleep. My guess is you would not have made the gains I made on this swing, but would have slept better. My approach was certainly higher risk. But I try not to sell until the downtrend is baked in and then watch it carefully.
I recall something about your panic sells, and it seems that you were able to take advantage of that kind of screwed up situation and you were able to come out of the whole matter a bit better than Rosewater and BMB.. hahahahaha
Your outline of the stress of the matter are all real concerns, and yeah, you can take your profits in fiat or in BTC, and decide how you are going to treat your accounting and your taxes, whether you have yet realized any gain that is necessary to report in regards to taxes....
I am not really sure about how to measure my situation because if we look at BTC's recent price history we can start at $5k, and see that BTC's price went from $5k to $20k and then back down to $6k and assuming that it is returning back to $20k.
For simplicity sake, let's say that the first time that we passed above $5k we were mostly loaded down with BTC so for all intents and purposes we had X BTC and $0; however, when we got up to $20k, we had about a 4x increase in price, which would have caused us to sell about 20% of our BTC which gets converted into fiat (we sell about 20% because we are selling about 10% every time the price doubles - or 1% for every 10% price rise, and if the price goes up 4x, it has doubled twice). When BTC prices return back down to $6k, we end up using almost all of the fiat that we accumulated on the way up to $20k to buy back BTC. We are not getting those BTC at the cheapest price because we are exercising incrementalism, so if we are lucky, we might accumulate 10% more BTC with the 20% fiat that we accumulated, and when we return back up to $20k, we may only end up with about 5% more BTC than we had the first time around.
Surely, I am ball parking these numbers, and in the end, like you mentioned, no killing is being made, but you can sit back and feel comfortable and keep your blood pressure down by 10 to 20 points, perhaps.
And, really, we hardly ever get 70% price corrections like this, but we do get a whole hell of a lot of corrections that are a lot smaller between 10% and 40%, and you can have decent stacking up no matter what the level of volatility because usually your orders are going to at least be able to account for 10% swings, and maybe more commonly allow for some catching smaller swings, too -- 5% can be reasonable, and some high volume high frequency traders will do 1% swings, and I am not going to do that, and currently, I consider myself to be in the 5% to 10% arena... so even my system and application varies a bit with the passage of time.. like I mentioned earlier, I started out at using 1.5% increments, and kind of got into about a 5% increments groove, and progressed beyond 5% and up to 15% increments - however, I think that I am moving back below 10% increments, at least on a short-term basis.... based on what I perceive to be current market conditions.