The chance is not 50/50.  For example, Murphy's Law, which is infinitely more reliable than PlanB, stipulates that the moment after I drop a large proportion of my BTC, BTC will suddenly rocket off to six digits.  (But what does Murphy say about the chances if I don't?)


Thanks for the suggestion.  Sleeping better is not my primary goal:  Salvaging as much BTC as I can is my primary goal (now tempered by "no more dumping other assets into this account!"), even at the expense of sleep, health, sanity, and everything else that I have been sacrificing for months because of this.  Anyway, I just crunched some numbers for a back-of-the-envelope estimate of something that changes as the BTC price fluctuates.

At $30,600 (the approximate ticker price when I saw your post, and started spitballing various scenarios), I would need to sell about 61% of my BTC to get my liquidation price down to the current 200 WMA.  That is still not "no chance of a total wipeout", because (a) in the past, it has often wicked below 200 WMA when it bottoms, and (b) 200 WMA is not guaranteed, anyway.

I would need to sell at least 65%-70% to get myself to a level that could be considered pretty much more or less "safe" - excluding flash-crashes, such as the March 2020 Covid crash, when it did the proportionate equivalent of very briefly dropping to about $12k now.

No matter what level is considered "safe", it must account for the wicks - such as the very brief drop below $30k that almost got me liquidated yesterday.


This is all assuming that I could sell at the stated price.  I have enough that the way that market makers arrange their orders, I would need either to catch a period of low volatility (when makers tend to set their real spread tighter), or use some trading strategy to avoid slicing through through the order book enough to change the whole calculation (when makers tend to set a string of tiny orders on the book, withdrawing their bigger orders to as much as 1–2% away from mid-market).

This does not mean I'm rich!  To illustrate the problem, my last 0.2 BTC sell during extreme volatility yesterday cut through the order book so that most of it was filled about $200 lower than the ticker price, thus appreciably deepening the hourly candlestick's bottom wick on this exchange as seen here.  (Those who want to take a lesson out of this for newbies should note the effect on cascading liquidations during crashes; I think that not many people realize this, or have studied it.)  And even if I am have a relatively small amount compared to some here, 61%-75% of what I have is much more than 0.2 BTC!

The effect of leverage is nonlinear.  Many margin newbies don't realize that.  Every 1% increase or decrease in BTC price has a counterintuitively large impact on the amount that I would need to sell to reach safety level x, for any given x.  (This the scenario now, as I conclude this writing at $31,500, is significantly better than when I started bouncing numbers and thinking this through - but not enough "significantly" to avoid being horrific.)  As I said in some earlier post, at $47k last month, I could have walked away clean with more BTC than I started with; but now, no matter what I do, I will lose most of my long-held holdings if yesterday was not the bottom, or at worst close to the bottom.