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I try to be quite disciplined about investing in crypto ever since I stumbled into it on a friend's suggestion. I tend to look out for long term plays and I'm a pretty boring sort of investor. My first goal after starting was to make sure that I recouped anything that I put into the system so that I would only ever be playing with "house money", and that was a target that was met a while back.

So, my wife and I started to talk about what we wanted our crypto fund to represent in our lives. I'm not an active trader and have no desire to be one, and so making money out of trading is just out of the question. Partly because I'm probably quite terrible at it and more importantly, I feel like I could use my time and life better than staring at a screen to try and chase and rack up numbers... in the pursuit of what? So, I'm also a bit the same with all the hot trends in DeFi and NFTs... I've already staked my positions on these things a while back with protocol and platform tokens, and so I have no desire to go crazy chasing the next big thing.

What we did decide upon for our crypto, was that it should principally act as an additional leg in our long-view retirement. We are both musician freelancers... and it is hard to save towards a traditional superannuation in this manner as we would have to manually contribute instead of harnessing employer contributions. Or another option would be that we would use it for something completely life-changing... although, given our small amounts of desires and wants... we don't really have much in the way of things that would really satisfy this alternative goal! Of course, ideally, we wouldn't burn through it... as I am still idealistic, and I do think that these things MIGHT have long-term value that will live past our own lives and onwards to our children. Maybe...

So, as part of this discipline... I have long ago structured targets for myself. Price targets for individual tokens/coins or the entire portfolio where I would be happy selling off a small percentage into stablecoins, always keeping exposure even if the entire thing mooned to something unbelievable. These proceeds would then act as a hedge to buy back in, in case of a sudden dip or bear market... and some of it would be rerouted into other assets, such as stocks and superannuation. After all, diversity is the key to long term investment... you avoid loss, rather than chasing gain. Despite what some in the cryptocurrency echo chamber might say... all tokens/coins are STILL currently a similar enough asset class to warrant a bit more distance.

So, in recent days (before this sudden dip), our portfolio had started to approach another "total" sell trigger... and there were a few coins that had actually run up quite a lot. So, despite being busy with the house and my assignments... I found the occasional time to market sell a small percentage of some tokens. I hadn't gone through everything... due to lack of time to bring things to exchanges like Binance or Kucoin, and chunks that were time-locked with staking or just time-locked distributions. Plus, I was more focused on preparing for the coming CoinList instead. Still, I did manage a little bit and stashed it way in stablecoin liquid swaps on Binance and fed a little bit to the Stoic bot.

The idea of setting long-term triggers for selling some portion of your crypto is that you make these plans way in advance... preferably in a bear or neutral market. So that you have some perspective on what is important to you, and you are always worrying about FOMO and second-guessing if you were selling at the right price. Of course, you never offload everything... just little packets at predefined intervals which your past self has agreed is more than acceptable. If you stick to the plan, then you won't look back and wonder if you could have just held out... you would have caught the peak. No, you would not have caught the peak... you would have missed it!

In many ways, this is the reverse of the Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) strategy for buying into crypto... you know that you won't be able to catch the falling knives... and so, you stagger your buying intervals. It is a disciplined method that takes the long view. Likewise, having a disciplined selling strategy is the mirror complement... I do have a long term idealist outlook for all of this... but not all of it, and I have no idea what will or won't survive! So, the best I cna do is to try and average out the risks and take something to either hedge or shunt towards other investments.

This time around, I was lucky... in a manner of speaking. Yesterday was a sea of red... and after being quite a bit shocked about the sudden change in portfolio value (remember, I was knocking on the door of a selling trigger... and now am nearly half-way back to the previous one again!), I realised that this was an interesting opportunity to just market buy most of the tokens that I had just sold... and just reset the total selling trigger to the next time!

So, I'm looking at a bit of a Groundhog day situation here... this will now be the third attempt to run up to this sell trigger. The first time, I was travelling and wasn't able to take advantage of it to sell anything... this time, I sold bits and pieces, and then bought them back lower... Next time, I'm hoping it will be a lasting sale!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
Stoic: A USD maximisation bot trading on Binance using long-term long strategies, powered by the AI/human system of Cindicator.