Even though we know that their are aspects of the mindset and approach that differs between investors and traders, the concept of investing (or putting in) no more than you can afford to lose applies to both, so I am not sure why guys keep getting caught up upon the idea of not putting in more than you can lose as if it were a gambling/trading mentality, when it also applies to investing...especially in something as volatile as bitcoin.


Even traders will speculate that they will be better off to try to put their bitcoin to work by selling high and then rebuying BTC back lower, and so they consider that they are going to be able to build their BTC holdings faster and greater by trading rather than just focusing on buying... so surely they  may well have a lot of similar goals to investors so long as they are trying to stack more bitcoin rather than stacking dollars, yet they still run into an ongoing and ever-present problem of sometimes selling too much too soon or alternatively spending a lot of time waiting rather than proactively buying BTC.  

It will be rare for traders to outperform investors in a time period of a couple of cycles, yet they still are going to be advantaged when the limit their investment within their discretionary income and they are using money that is not needed for expenses and money that they could afford to lose, in the even that their trades go bad (not that any trader wants to lose, just as no investor wants to lose either, even though the investor is not tending to use any kind of selling techniques as part of his way to accumulate bitcoin).


There is a certain amount of correctness in your explanation ZeroVinsonN, and surely there can be people who knew about bitcoin when it was much lower prices, such as when it was below $10k through much of the time prior to 2021, and for some reason they were not motivated to either research into bitcoin or to start some kind of a BTC buying plan, and so through further BTC price actions and news around BTC, they may have come to realize (perhaps even when the BTC price crossed $100k) that bitcoin remains a good place to put their value, they are not able to turn back the clock, so they have to decide what to do based on their current position rather than wishing the BTC price would go back down to $10k, $20k, $30k, $40k, $50k or some of those other fantasy prices that are not likely to happen.  

Sure, right now we see that there are greater odds that BTC prices could  dip into the $70ks or even into the $60ks, yet there is no guarantee of that either, just as there was no guarantee that bitcoin was not going to continue to go up after reaching $100k rather than correcting back down.  Each of us has to decide what to do from where we are at rather than wishing to turn back the clock or even having expectations that the BTC price is going to dip, when there is no way to know if it is going to continue to dip or not, and the best that no coiners and low coiners can do is to start to buy BTC and to not get overly concerned about price, since no matter what they do, it is going to take a while to build their bitcoin portfolio, and it is likely better that they figure out ways to consistently and persistently buy bitcoin rather than engaging in further waiting patterns, which might have had been part of their past mistake if they had failed/refused to act upon their having had heard about bitcoin prior to 2021.

No matter the money we have coming in, we can decide if we are going to invest large portions of our discretionary income into bitcoin at whatever are the current prices or if we are going to hold any of that money back for buying dips, and surely we might have some decently good ideas about our regular income and our regular expenses, yet at the same time, there may be some times in which we are able to generate higher income or receive extra funds that we can consider if we are going to put that extra money into bitcoin right away at the current price or to hold some of it back for buying dips or spreading it out in a DCAing kind of a way of deferring our buying of bitcoin.

There is no exactly correct answer to the question, and guys have to figure out their own balancing of their aggressiveness in accumulating bitcoin within the confines of considering their own individual factors.



I am not really opposed to the idea of playing around and attempting to find BTC price dips within certain periods of time, so long at guys are not letting a lot of dollars stack up because they are waiting for dips, rather than just buying regularly.

If you are investing for a long time, perhaps 10 years or longer, then why would it matter if you are able to luckily time some kind of maximum dip with your weekly (or perhaps your bi-weekly) buys rather than just buying at whatever the BTC price might be and some of those times might be dips and other times might not be dips.  In fact, with regular and persistent buys, some of the times that the BTC buys happen might end up being the opposite of dips, but why would it matter very much in the whole scheme of things, when likely the more important thing is regularly buying and not waiting around too much for dips that may or may not end up happening?

I am not suggesting that there is any preference for anyone to buy when BTC prices are higher, but there are difficulties figuring out dips that may or may not happen, and our ability to identify dips may well be mostly a product of luck rather than anything that we can get realistic feels for when or how much.  

If a person has $100 per week and decides to invest $75 every week no matter what, and hold back $25 for possible dips, I don't see any real harm in those kinds of strategies, yet if guys are holding back more than 25% of their authorized BTC purchasing money, they may well be getting distracted from their own goals that should be ongoingly making sure that they are sufficiently/adequately prepared for up.  

Guys likely differ in their assessments about how much of their new money coming in to allocate in their preparing for up rather than preparing for down, and surely I would consider that low coiners should be wanting to allocate more of their new money coming if towards their preparations for up rather than their preparations for down, yet surely that is up to them.. and yeah, we we get into trading ideas if guys engage in practices in which they are wanting to use money that is already allocated into bitcoin in order to prepare for further down (that may or may not happen)..so they will start to believe that down is more likely than up and so they will end up even selling portions (if not all) of their already accumulated BTC to prepare for down rather than keeping it in a status that is prepared for up (by staying in BTC).  A lot of guys have screwed up their bitcoin holdings by engaging in these kinds of shifts in their focus rather than staying mostly allocated and focused in making sure they stay sufficiently/adequately prepared for up.


You don't seem to know what you are talking about.  We have been in a bull market since November 2022, and yeah we might not have had been sure about our having had been in a bull market until mid-to-late 2023, but still markets do not just flip flop between bear and bull and we are not in two at the same time, even though sometimes we might not be clear about which one we are in, since being able to assess that we switched remains a bit of a lagging indicator.

Sure, if you are referring to having a lot of volatility, then the volatility can go in either direction, and we can have periods of apparent consolidation that flip into volatility and then flip back into consolidation, yet even those shorter term transitions can be difficult to identify either the break out or the direction of the breakout.


If you have been registered here since mid 2017, you are getting close to 8 years in bitcoin, so hopefully, you have figured out that it is better to keep accumulating bitcoin, yet from your posts, I question the extent to which you have learned those kinds of lessons about how to go about bitcoin accumulation and not to be overly occupied with BTC price swings.

Of course, even if you had a relatively tight budget of $30 per week, if you had been investing $30 per week into bitcoin since the begining of your forum registration, by now you would have invested a bit more than $12k into bitcoin and you would have had accumulated about 1 bitcoin.  Not a bad place to be on such a budget level.


Those are similar concepts, but they are not the same thing.

Sure, you are correct Mayor of ogba about our needs to make sure that our living expenses are covered, and surely our initial investment into bitcoin is based on such considerations that we are not spending beyond the capacity of our discretionary income.

We presume that as our bitcoin investment goes on, especially after investing 4 years or more, then we have greater and greater odds that our investment is going to be in profits and we are going to have more options to be able to draw into that money at some point down the road, and surely there is some truth that if our bitcoin investment ends up being in profits then we have more and more options and also we develop more and more confidence that our investment is going at least as good as expected and perhaps even better than expected.

Yet, the fulfilling of our expectations is not guaranteed, and even though we can choose to cash out parts of our bitcoin investment at various points along the way, we still have the choice to reassess whether the money that we have in bitcoin continues to be money that we are willing to lose or not.. or that we are willing to let it continue to ride.. and surely it becomes easier if the money is in profits, but the dilemma never completely goes away... even though it seems that the most applicable time for the consideration of our willingness to lose the money is when we first allocate that money into bitcoin by buying.

We can have both concepts floating in our head at the same time, and sure we likely have presumptions about bitcoin having a likely long term upward price trajectory, yet we also know that bitcoin's long term upward price trajectory is never guaranteed and remains a probability that we consider to be high enough that we stay invested in bitcoin at the allocation level that we continue to choose to keep.

We might be engaged in an argument about semantics if we want to say that "money we can afford to lose" and "money we can do away with for a long time" mean the same thing or mean different things, yet just from reading the words, I see more of an expectation that the investment is guaranteed in the second statement as compared with the first statement, even though practically we likely are thinking both of the variations of similar ideas when we first get into bitcoin and as we continue to maintain our bitcoin investment.


I think that you are describing situations that are really not very important, especially if someone is considering his bitcoin investment to be 10 years or longer.  Yeah, the guy is going to have bitcoin purchases at various prices, and sure maybe he can make some of his buys at lower prices, yet each time that he buys bitcoin, he is likely ONLY buying a fraction of the amount that he is going to accumulate, and sure maybe he also ended up accumulating most of his bitcoin in his first 4 -6 years, yet if he does not have any expectation of reaching his accumulation goal in that time, there may not be ways that he can effectively alter his stash size by engaging in torturous attempts at trying to figure out short term BTC price movements and the extent to which his portfolio might be advantaged by waiting versus just ongoingly acting to buy regularly, consistently, persistently, ongoingly and perhaps even aggressively.


Part of our setting of expectations should include the consideration that a variety of future BTC related scenarios could play out, and so  within the variety of scenarios there are some scenarios that are better and some that are worse and some are more probable to play out and others are less likely to play out.  We are not even guaranteed that one of the most probable scenarios will end up playing out.

Surely, we should be putting ourselves in a position to attempt to control which input variables that we are able to control, and surely we should be able to see that some kinds of scenarios are more probable than others, and we can monitor our progress along the way towards our goals, and we should be able to see the extent to which we remain on track, even though our projection out of our path forward becomes way more concrete when we have spent years building it as compared with when we are hypothesizing about it in the earliest of stages of getting started.  

We might have some unexpected deviations along the way, so those deviations might not have been included in our earliest projections, so we then have to adapt our future projections to take account of what happened and also to take account of any other kinds of our expectations and/or understandings of the world.


All the charts are right, until they aren't.