After my last post talking about how much I'd love to see more mixed content, I not only found some but now I'm going to write about crypto anyway... Those who aren't here for the crypto-talk, bear with me (no market pun was intended there, but I'm taking credit for it now). If you have any sort of value in accounts with fees, interest (in either direction), or any currency whatsoever and you'd like to see more of it so you can live a little better, you should also be paying attention to the system where your money lives--or may live in the not-too-distant future.
Alright, I have to tangent for a second on that last thought; I don't buy the hype that I will be exclusively using cryptocurrency to buy things and pay bills directly in the next ten years, but I do know that a great deal of the technology behind my banks' digital processes is going crypto one way or another--even if it is their own cooked version (looking at you guys, Visa). This means there is a potential for solidarity based on something even more important than moving the "tangible"--moving the intangible honestly and securely.
Ok, getting back on track... Oh, wait. I should also throw in that I'm not an investment professional, I'm not even that experienced in the crypto world, but I'm offering my observations. Most of what I intend to offer is the technical data I have based on our small mining rig and the attention to market and news that has led me to, and some emotional data points from someone who might still be somewhat newbish--which anyone who's been at a poker table can tell you is nearly impossible to predict, but if you do, you'll quickly gain control in the game.
As you may already know, I came into the market with real intent around the end of last year. I looked at a few charts, I read as many articles on the companies involved in some coin/token names I'd heard floating around the most, and I started to form a strategy. I've made a respectable gain in long-term stocks and ETFs, but the sheer speed of the crypto market made me think there were some very real short-to-mid term opportunities. That's not to say I didn't put some money in the heartier coins, but I started to backslide into wanting to see the money working right away, as I had done in my earlier investment life. I regretted being too impatient in the appropriate amount of time after realizing that I was not even close to having the time required to be a short-term trader of any kind. Some more time has since become available, but I'll get to all of that in a later post.
Right. So, now to the topic at hand; What in the great, blue frack is going on here?! I bought into coins like Litecoin, Etherium, Ripple (still on the fence about that one, but I love the tech), Stellar, NEO, and so on--pretty much of the top-twenty list at the time. Since most of the movement has been parallel between the various coins, I'll use ETH as my example because it didn't parallel the others right away. No, ETH brought us hope when there was none. I--like many other NEO holders later--was reveling in Etherium's ability to stay in the game after so many others had flickering lights already. Then--again, same as the other NEO holders later--I watched ETH pulled down by Bitcoins gravity as it slowly descended.
Every day, I started off with some of my favorite casts like Crytpo Coin News and Coin Mastery. I kept hearing the reassurances that only newbs worry and there's a little trouble here but it's all FUD and of course, HODL, HODL, HODL. By the time I started hearing, "This is normal stuff this time of year," and "This is simply the time to buy, folks," I knew there was trouble in paradise. Now, as a long-term investor, I'm more than familiar with weathering storms; In fact, I'd say since the day I bought my first share of high-yield dividend stock, I've grown some fairly thick skin in the cold.
So, I waited. And, oddly, the more I heard other people pointing out everyone else's panic (of which I hadn't actually witnessed myself until it was being pointed out), the more I started to feel it edging on. I felt myself watching the prices dip and dip and then, one final tweak to my mining control program later and I was in full on social-media-post panic. I added a graph to the mining controller that didn't just track how many coins it had mined (that's not going to go down, so why graph it on that screen), but how much the mined coin was worth over time. Then, I watched as the apex of the largest spike slowly--then quickly--tore the accrual down to a regular, steep loss. The coin was losing value faster than we could mine it.
For days it stayed like this. So, am I freaked out? After a brief moment of reacting to seeing the unexpected suddenly and repeatedly, no. Do I think the current trend is long-lasting? No, but I think we're in for more heavy downward movement with intermittent spikes of newb-hope (and maybe day/short-trader wet-dreams) based on the previous years' trends and the economic and legal weight on the market right now. If I had to bet on it (and, trust me, I have already), I'd say we'll see some serious, stable recovery in late February/early March at the earliest. Do I think we're going to the moon? Yes, but now that the sideways movement is finally starting to act like it might behave for longer periods of time, I think it will be a slower--maybe steadier, probably not--ride.
Fortune rewards the patient; Stay hungry now, eat like a king later.