Well, it looks like I messed up. I bought a couple of coins relatively close to the peak.
It wasn't a case of FOMO, just that as a novice to crypto, I didn't appreciate at that stage just HOW volatile prices could be. In both cases, they were projects with a solid use case, decent white papers and with good prospects for long term growth. One was Algorand, the other was Loopring, so they are by no means memecoins. I didn't buy too many of each, so I was definitely following the advice all newbies see to only invest what I can afford to lose, and to do my own research. Research which in this case wasn't really good enough, so I've learned some lessons there !
The mistake I made was that because I'd done the sensible thing and stored both of the coins in question offline in a Ledger device, it meant they weren't sitting on exchanges where I could create a stop-loss to automatically sell them if the price dropped too much.
When prices started slipping, I thought "oh, it's just a blip, these are good coins, they'll go back up soon enough". Then they kept slipping, and it rapidly got to the point where I now think I might as well leave them where they are, and just hope they come back up in price one day to recoup the initial investment.
Selling them now would be pretty pointless. What I do wonder is how to calculate the price at which they drop so far that their underlying blockchains cease to work. There has to be a price at which the rewards don't exist to keep nodes running and transactions being processed. With prices at 48 cents for LRC and 37 cents for ALGO, they're close to shitcoin territory relative to what I paid for them.
Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay
Sadly, they never went up enough above what I paid for them to make it practical to pull out the initial investment - although that was the plan, there needs to be enough growth to make it worth doing. Another lesson learned !
Oh boy, do I feel stupid now ! But I have learned a lot from this.
For ALGO and LRC, I'm mentally writing them off as lost; if they ever come back up enough to be worth it, I'll pull my investment out (probably shifting it to BTC, which I still believe is a better long term store of value and currency than Fiat). With ALGO, there is at least the gain that can be had from their governance program, which acts as a multiplier on any price increase.
In future, I'll definitely pull profit out of coins I buy at a much earlier stage, in dribs and drabs rather than waiting until I can do it in one lump sum. More importantly, I will set a price for each coin or token and if it drops down to that, I'll sell it, even if it means getting it out of an offline wallet and doing it manually. I still think keeping coins on an exchange is a greater risk.
If being in crypto teaches one thing, it is definitely how to improve your mental resilience, and that is an incredibly important life skill !