Recognize the chart?
If you are in crypto since more than 3 months, chances are you're looking at almost identical charts every day.
90% of all altcoins that were very popular in April this year have this chart.
I'm in a lot of Facebook and Telegram discussion groups where the main questions asked are
"When Lambos?",
"When Moon?",
"Why is the price dropping?"
The answer is usually : "just HODL!".
Some variants are "the whales are keeping the price down..", "don't be a weak hand", "buy the dip!"
Well, my conclusion is, for 90% of the altcoins, HODL is a very bad and expensive strategy.
Only a few coins will survive until 2018, without a real product that solves a real problem and without a REAL USE for the coin itself. Looking back, lots of altcoins I believed in back in May, have an an almost identical path and trading chart. Low price for a while, big Pump & Dump with 10x increases, then a slow and painful return to initial value.
I remember back then, a lot of people saying, hey, this coin is a strong one, look at the roadmap, buy it and keep it for a year. I believed that. I bought it and waited for something to happen. after 6 months what is the situation? well, now there are other projects, promising the same thing, only better, that get the attention. these coins from 6 months ago are forgotten, no one is talking about them, except the HODL people holding big bags from the P&D all time high, asking "when Moon? when Lambos". Well Moon and Lambos are not coming. The coins will die.
We have a few coins with potential: BTC, ETH, NEO. Maybe Lisk and Waves, if they do it right. These coins have a real use and get all the attention. It helps to be the first, to be the original.
No use for the coin? well, no use, why pay for it? this is not a stock, you don't own a share of the company. If the only use for the coin is to get the ICO investment, then you know, you paid the owners of the project, which means they are rich now and can enjoy the lambos. They have no real responsibility to make the project work as promised in the whitepaper. A good reason why now every country wants to put some rules and regulations to the whole ICO business. That's actually for our protection.
My advice to you is, Cut your losses - if you bought altcoins at a price in the upper part of the chart below, and after six months those roadmap milestones are not coming any nearer and especially if you have more than 40% losses, sell and don't look back.
Take the money and invest it in newer projects, ideally while they are still in the initial phase, where the Pump and dump didn't happen yet. After the Pump & Dump, take profits. You're here for the money.
If you are a long term investor and really want to HODL and wait one year , that works too, but put your money in very safe coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum or NEO. You have two strategies here:
One special note on NEO, you are maybe asking yourself why is NEO on my list. Well, with NEO you can run a very smart investment strategy that will multiply your NEO in time, using the Wallet to generate more NEO automatically.
This gives an yearly return of about 8%. Which is lot more and easier than most of the classic investments.
By the way, Lisk and Waves have similar investment methods as a standard feature, using coin Leasing or coin Voting. These methods require only to keep the coins in the wallet, no online time or mining time needed.
And to finish in a more optimistic mode, the crypto world is full of unlimited possibilities. You can indeed reach financial freedom with altcoins. You can only do that if you do your research, learn from your mistakes and never stop searching for the good opportunities.
