The bear market will make or break you, but today I will be focusing on ways it can break you, so you need to avoid it. First of all, when investing you have to know why you are investing, is it for the long term or for the short term? I think this will help you better in managing your emotions during the bear market. But then, we are talking about mistakes people make during the bear market.
Panic Selling this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in the bear season, especially when you are selling at a loss. When investing and you are at loss, your brain tends to try to imagine what the future might be? You start thinking of possible mistakes you will make or how you are going to regret this decision you are making by not selling now. This makes us feel so much fear that we end up making a lot of irrational decisions like panic selling at a loss.
This same feelings also occur during the Bull market where people buy when the price is pumping based on FOMO(Fear Of Missing Opportunities) doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do. The bear market is supposed to be the moment to buy a lot of tokens with utility so that you can take profit during the Bull market. Bear Market is buying them at a huge discount, like Black Fridays but for crypto. This period you make a lot of decisions not based on critical thinking but based on irrational feelings and emotions. So yeah, panic selling during the bear market is one mistake. If you are a long term investor, why sell now when you could wait for years to reap your fruit, but if you are a short term investor, may be that’s the right decision for you.
Another mistake I used to make was always waiting for the best bottom to buy and the best top to sell, like timing a perfect bottom, which is almost impossible, completely impossible in my opinion. No one knows when it’s the perfect bottom to buy or the perfect top to sell. While waiting for the perfect bottom to buy, you might just miss out on an opportunity when the market reverses and starts going bullish, because you spent too much time timing the perfect bottom. So if you want to buy, it’s best you buy at that moment or better still, dollar cost average in. This way, you don’t miss out on buying opportunities, because you can never time the perfect bottom.
One thing this bear market has taught us is that, keeping your funds on centralized exchanges is the worst, look at lots of exchanges that halted deposit and withdrawal of funds from their platforms because, they were insolvent. Just like the popular saying “Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto”. So storing your assets in a hot centralized wallet is very risky, because the company can wake up one day and tell you they are insolvent and all you have to do is hope they refund your money back to you. Store your assets in DEX Wallets or cold storages, this way you are totally in control of your assets. Centralized exchanges get insolvent during the bear market because, people are panic selling.
Another mistake you can make in this bear market is borrowing money or using money you can’t afford to lose to trade. That will put you into more debts that you are already in, if you borrow money to trade or buy crypto assets hoping to be in profit in few months time, sorry, but you have to look for another means to pay back your loan. The crypto market doesn’t give us notifications on when it’s going to pump or dump, so making plans based on when you expect it to pump or dump is a very big mistake you are making. This will keep you in debt if the market doesn’t pump as expected, so never borrow money to trade.
The last mistake we make is never taking care of our mental health when investing. A lot can happen when you are mentally unhealthy because of the constant stress of investing. Learn to take a break and have some time of reflection so you can have a clearer mind, do things that rejuvenates you, do not ignore your mental health, know when to rest and have a break. Don’t go looking at the chart every time because your eyes can’t change anything in the market. This is mostly Emphasized