You seem to be on margin in btc.
No. I would
never do something so stupid as to take a leveraged long on a highly volatile asset.
Instead, I shorted the dollar at high leverage. The dollar's fundamentals are wretchedly bad. In the long term, it is practically guaranteed to depreciate severely. Shorting the dollar is smart - at least in theory.
The problem is that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", and the dollar is now in a bull-run bubble.
I don't typically short anything. FAANG looked like a short, but still I hesitated.
Well..i can now buy 30-50% MORE FAANG for my cash if i want to, but i won't.
When you took margin longs 20 years ago as you previously described, you were shorting the dollar as priced in semi-fungible tokens called "stocks".
People need to flip their thinking about BTC. "Selling" BTC means buying dollars. "Buying" BTC means selling dollars. Shorting BTC means taking a leveraged long on the dollar. And taking a leveraged long position on BTC is short-selling the dollar: Borrowing an asset that is expected to depreciate, and selling it for money.
Related in concept, but not directed at you:
People are way too stuck in thinking about dollars as "money", and everything else as "assets priced in money (= dollars)".
It was quite the spectacle when I tried to explain some concepts to a newbie by putting them in familiar terms, based on his own experience.
I told him that when he took a home purchase mortgage loan, he was shorting the dollar as priced in a non-fungible token called a "house". If the dollar rises too much, as priced in units of his house, then the lender reserves the right to call the loan due immediately, among other remedies; this is logically similar to a margin call. And indeed, all home purchase mortgages contain such terms in the fine print - although they are rarely invoked because the dollar/house market has low volatility, and dollars rarely appreciate as priced in houses. Anyway, the expense and other overhead of foreclosures
usually helps to deter lenders from being overly aggressive in foreclosing unless necessary. By contrast, as I pointed out earlier, exchanges have a perverse incentive to stack the deck to create
more cryptocurrency "foreclosures" (liquidations).
He didn't get it.
If he had understood that, then perhaps he would have been able to "get" Bitcoin. (And he would have understood why he should not use margin - or home purchase mortgages!)
Yes, I explained earlier how I got myself into such a predicament when I know all this - "I know better than that..."