I have some higher education and graduate school work and then some career (work) experience that had dealt with analyzing information, critically assessing the information and then making recommendations in regards to the findings or persuasiveness of the information.

I have not really considered my research and writings in regards to bitcoin to have been very academically based nor very technologically informed, but instead attempts to attempt to help myself and others to brainstorm ideas in order that we might be able to achieve better assessments of our own financial and psychological situations in order to help us to better tailorize our decisions to get involved in bitcoin and to allocate in accordance with our personal particulars.

Surely, I feel that I have been ongoingly studying these matters related to bitcoin since getting into bitcoin in late 2013, and surely some of my attempts to help others through the forum are also meant to help myself too in better understanding my own approach and framing and reframing and consideration and reconsideration of the dynamic nature of bitcoin-related information.


You are correct that I should probably try to bump the thread more frequently - even though from time to time, I feel that I need to tweak or update some of the posts to make them more timely...  or to maybe add some content on some other related topics that I find interesting and I have discussed in some other threads.


It does seem as if investing and gambling are on a spectrum in terms of there are ways to engage in behaviors that are more towards one end of the spectrum or the other end of the spectrum, but they are likely not completely pure concepts in terms of being separable from one another as sometimes folks like to talk in terms of black and white absolutes.

Trading does seem to have a lot of aspects that are closer to gambling rather than to investing, even though there are ways that trading can be employed to hedge risk, so in that regard be incorporated as part of an overall investing strategy. and likely if any of us are wanting to consider trading as investing we would likely need to attempt to trade in bigger and wider gaps to offset risks or to serve as insurance rather than considering trading in terms of shorter term profit making. but I suppose there are some folks who can become really good at trading in such a way that they feel that they are not really taking very many risks because they are striving to set up their orders in such a way to take both sides, so they are merely hedging their bets which could end up fitting more within a kind of investing perspective rather than a gambling perspective.

I would also speculate that the more informed that you are regarding various factors, then it is likely that you are more able to set your bets in accordance with the probability of one outcome versus another outcome, so in that sense there would likely be less risk-taking involved. and it would fit less on the spectrum of gambling, even though some folks will still want to characterize such perspective and practices as gambling.

It seems that when we are talking about how to accumulate BTC, I am recommending to accumulate BTC through dollar cost averaging, buying on dips and lump sum investing.. also HODL would apply within the same accumulation strategy that I am attempting to recommend.  

I do not recommend selling BTC and buying back cheaper as a BTC accumulation strategy, and so in my own personal approach to BTC, I do not really get into trading as a recommended practice until getting to either the maintenance stage or to the liquidation stage.  I also believe that the use of any kinds of financial instruments is a more advanced technique, and really I am not opposed to employing various kind of leveraging in order to front load a BTC investment, but of course, front loading does take more calculations about the cost of the loan, BTC's likely direction and having other sources of income to service the debt in the event that BTC prices do not go up during the period of the loan which would have been the preferred outcome., which of course is never a guaranteed outcome, even if BTC's price direction happens to be looking quite favorable (bullish).

So if we set our targets regarding how much BTC we would like to accumulate in terms of percentage of our overall investment portfolio, perhaps starting out with something like a target that 1% to 25% of overall investment portfolio would be allocated in BTC, so once we reach our target level of BTC or even if we have overachieved our target, then we may well have more options in terms of starting to employ some selling as the BTC price goes up, and using those proceeds to buy back as the BTC price goes down.  Surely these kinds of techniques of selling on the way up and buying on the way down could be considered as trading and gambling, but I would not consider them to fit so well in the category of gambling because largely we can preset the BTC selling amounts and the price and then just let the price come to our set amount.  

If the BTC price does not go to the point in which we had set our sell order, then no sale is made... so we can structure the various sell points in a kind of laddering manner on the way up and choosing what amount of increments that we would like to set between each of our sell amounts and also how much BTC we would like to sell at each ladder rung level. One formula that I had frequently applied historically was selling somewhere around 1% of the value of my BTC holdings for every 10% that the BTC price goes up.  Of course those kind of formulas can be tweaked to be higher or lower, and they can be framed in different kinds of ways of flexibility, but if such a formula were to be followed you also be able to figure out how much BTC you would end up selling all the way up the spectrum to various price points and be able to figure out how much BTC you would have remaining and the value of that remaining BTC at various price points up the price ladder.  You should also be able to conclude that if your sell rate was ONLY 1% per every 10% price rise, then you would never run out of BTC by strictly following such a formula... so therefore you can figure out whether your sell strategy is overly conservative or overly aggressive depending on what you would like to achieve if the BTC price reaches your speculated price points.

I got (and modified) several of my selling on the way up ideas from Rpietila's (Risto) (RIP) 2013 Thread entitled.:  (SSS) - A Sane and Simple bitcoin Savings plan