First: You misquoted me since you did not quote the proper location from which you took my quote.. which you should have had linked this one.
Oh okay, Thanks for pointing that out. I did not mean to misquote you..
I am still getting used to the forum and learning as I go. I appreciate your correction..
Second: I am not going into detail about psychology, yet if we are trying to determine the difference between discretionary funds and "the amount that you can afford to lose," then there surely seems to be a bit of subjectivity and psychology involved when any of us are constructing those kinds of limits for ourselves. We likely will get ourselves into big trouble if we become too aggressive in one direction or another, so there frequently seems to be quite a bit of balancing that any of us ends up doing, and many times even folks with a lot of similar objective factors will end up balancing out their actions differently based on subjective considerations and/or comfort levels.
Yeah, true. Psychology is really a personal thing, even if the numbers look simple, how someone feels about risk and losing money always affects what they do. Everyone balance between going all in or playing it safe is different.
Question: Since you have been at this for a long time now, bcus you profile shows you’ve been in this forum since Feb. 2014 and u also said you’ve been into Bitcoin since 2013, that’s a really long time, if only I was as early as you’re lol…
My question is, how do you personally decide when to adjust your investment percentage as the market changes? Like, do you have any rules or something you look out for to know when to scale up or down your Bitcoin buying? Or do you jst DCA all through with a fist amount??
Of course, each of us has to go by our own circumstances and attempt to tailor our bitcoin approach to our personal situation, which even includes our sense of bitcoin as an investment compared with other places that we might put value.
I likely was fairly convinced about bitcoin from the start, at least in terms of the boundaries of my tentative plan.
When I came to bitcoin, I had already been investing in various kinds of assets for more than 20 years, so I had built up various kinds of holdings, but mostly in index funds and some aspects in property and businesses, yet at the same time, I had frequently been interested in hedging some of my prior investment to make it gold-like (a hedge against the dollar), and one of my abilities to continue to contribute to a 401k plan was drying up, so I wanted to build some investments (potentially bitcoin) to supplement my having had already built the 401k (the 401k investment did not disappear, only my ability to continue to add to it had disappeared), so I was actually thinking that a 10-20 year investment timeline, I might be able to both build my investment into something like bitcoin and to potentially have the bitcoin investment to be equal to or greater than the 401k that I had been building for somewhere close to 20 years.
So my initial plan was to just follow a 6 month budget that I had created, so I divided the 6 months into 26 parts in order to get my weekly bitcoin investment budget that I followed it for about 5 months and since my timeline was running out (around May 2014), I extended my authorization with another 6 month budget.. so then by the time November/December 2014 came, I started to conclude that maybe I had invested about 10% of my total investment portfolio into bitcoin, and I was starting to feel that I had enough..
and so then thereafter I could just invest into other things.. so the BTC price when I started was around $1,100 in late 2013, and in late 2014, the BTC price was around $380.. and so largely at that time, I started to think that I can just play it by ear with any additional investment that I might make and not to worry so much that I largely had enough bitcoin (even though my cost per BTC was around $600 at that time, so my holdings were around 40% in the negative... and I thought things would just work itself out.
Largely after that late 2014 and into a large part of 2015, the BTC price dropped from upper $300s and lower $400s into the mid-to-lower $200s and even had a couple times going into the mid-to-upper $100s.. so I continued to buy a little of bitcoin mostly in the mid $200s, but I largely had some cashflow problems at that time (with one of my businesses), so I was ONLY periodically able to accumulate bitcoin during 2015, yet even with all of that, I calculated that I had reached an overaccumulation stage because in mid to late 2015, my investment into bitcoin started to get to be around 13.5% of my overall investment portfolio, so I started to conclude that I had overaccumulated by around 3.5%, since my initial goal was to just get the bitcoin to be around 10% of my overall investment portfolio... so from my perspective, my considering myself to have had gotten into overaccumuation status gave me some additional options... in order dealing with my BTC portfolio, so i worked out some systems to sell on the way up and to buy on the way down, and developed some other strategies, whiich really did not take me out of BTC accumulation until perhaps around 2017 by the time that maybe I just went into more of a maintenance status, which means that I did not sell too much BTC on the way up in 2017, and then I bought back down in 2018 from whatever I had sold in 2017.. and in the end, I had been developing my various BTC management strategies based on my own circumstances and my perceptions of my circumstances.
I will say that I never really got out of overaccumulation status since you can see from my various charts that I had assessed my BTC holdings to be 9.5% of my total investment portfolio in late 2014, and then it was 13.5% in late 2015, and then it was 80% in late 2017, and then it was 42% in late 2018, 89% in late 2021, and 63% in mid 2022 (the last time that I updated
the chart).
I largely developed strategies that involved selling only small portions of my BTC holdings on the way up.. that might go up to 10% for every doubling, but in practice I did not tend to sell that much and I tended to buy much of if back, yet my theory had been that I wanted to be prepared if the bTC price went shooting up, so that I was never selling so much that I would regret it.. so I had an underlying BTC management approach that had a built in assumption that the BTC price could go shooting up, and then I did not want to be in a position of regretting to having to have sold too much too soon.
So largely through they years I just allowed whatever value in bitcoin to compound upon itself.. which I figure through 2015 and now, my bitcoin holdings has largely gone through
8 or 9 doublings, which adds up to around 256x appreciation, even though I have been considering counting something like $1k to $3k as my average cost per BTC.. so then it becomes easier to calculate with $1k per BTC.
Some comfort develops with being "in profits," but also potentially ongoingly studying our own circumstances in order to figure out if we might want to adjust any of the strategies that we might have... even if we might move from being in accumulation stage to maintenance stage and then to sustainable withdrawal stage.. We likely would be informed by our ongoing studying of bitcoin, in the even that we are engaged in such... and if we are invested in bitcoin, there should be motivation to stay interested in it.
Of course the guys who have $100 or more of discretionary income every week, are going to have more flexibility in terms of how they can employ their money as compared with guys who might ONLY have $10 or less of discretionary income each week, and so sometimes the guys with lower levels of discretionary income might rightfully come to the conclusion that they need to stay more focused on bitcoin as compared with their peers who might have more discretionary income at their disposal. And, they are not incorrect in coming to those kinds of conclusions about the likely need for them to be more focused and even more organized in their finances and focused in their thinking (psychology), yet there still can be ways to redirect focus and aggressiveness and/or perhaps figuring out ways to increase their discretionary income rather than potentially putting themselves into uncomfortable positions due to their seemingly maniacal focus on bitcoin accumulation that may well be ongoingly bordering upon overdoing it. which causes it to seem more like gambling rather than investing.
That’s fact. When you don’t have much extra money, it’s easy to feel like you need to go heavy just to make progress. But if not careful, it stops being investing and starts looking like gambling. I would say it is better to slow down, try to find ways to earn more or manage money better, than to take risks that can mess things later.
Well, there are likely various times that we need to start out with precaution in terms of making sure that we are investing from within our budget and we are picking an amount that is comfortable to us... and we don't want to end up getting wrecked.. even though in the beginning there might be less at stake, but still we should not be wanting to get wrecked due to some mistakes that we made that we could have had avoided or mitigated with more precautions on our end.
Surely in the beginning we likely need to error on the side of not overdoing it as we get used to both investing into bitcoin on a regular basis (hopefully something like weekly), and we get used to building up our cashflow management systems/practices to the extent that we don't already have those kind sof systems/practices in place. Both in the short run and longer term we want to be in the game and not forced out of the game due to our own mistakes.
You seem to be correct that sometimes we might believe that we are doing the right thing, and then we take actions that we believe are sufficiently correct in light of the information that we then know, but then later down the road, we come to realize that we over did it, and then we end up getting emotional about something that we could have had avoided (or at least minimized that kind of a later experienced emotional impact).
Yeah, it is usually when it is too late that we realize we went too far or took on more than we should have. And when things don’t go as planned, it really messes with the head. That is why i think it’s better to think ahead and try not to put ourselves in a position we’ll regret later.
Over the years, I have seen quite a few of the instances of guys selling too much too soon and/or failing/refusing to regularly buy bitcoin since they keep thinking that the BTC price is going to dip, and then their mistakes end up affecting their whole approach to bitcoin accumulation in a negative way... such as their inability to get back into bitcoin and other seemingly self-inflicted psychological problems... but yeah, sure there can be a variety of mistakes that contribute towards guys managing their bitcoin accumulation badly.
In the end, each of us chooses our levels, and surely most of us likely can see potential problematic aspects of aiming to invest (or even investing) 100% of our discretionary income into bitcoin, the exact level still does end up being a personal choice, and people can do whatever they like, even seemingly problematic things, but if they at least recognize the trade offs, then they might still end up coming to some kind of a balance that is similar to what other bitcoin investing aggressive guys are doing, even if they might just be labelling the categories of money differently... which sometimes might help if we are attempting to work with some hypotheticals so we might be able to specifically point out some of the trade offs if a guy might engage in one kind of conduct as compared with another kind of conduct, and even when we get into detailed hypotheticals, we still might not be able to capture various aspects of reality that involve ongoingly changing circumstances and even various kinds of factors that some guys might have to deal with as compared with other guys having different factors that might deal with their family life or their job or their personal health and/or other various kinds of income versus expense matters that they are dealing with. And so surely there are some guys who have relatively straight forwards income versus expenses and other guys who have a lot of complications in their income versus expenses, so guys should be creating their systems to attempt to account for those kinds of matters and for sure a guy who has way more complicated (perhaps erratic?) income versus expenses, then he likely is going to be way better served to keep larger quantities of back up funds on hand as compared with guys who might have fairly straight-forward (perhaps simple and regular?) income and expenses.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Everyone situation is different, and what works for one person might not work for the next. Would say it’s really about figuring out what fits your own life, especially when things like income or expenses are not always steady.
Question: One thing I’ve been thinking about though, when you’re trying to build long term Bitcoin, how do you personally rally round the whole thing? Like, do you separate part of your stack as something you might tap into during emergencies, or do you treat it all as untouchable no matter what?
I would think that folks probably have different arrangements in terms of coins they consider hot, medium and cold, and surely the practices could change over the years.
maybe in the very beginning a person keeps everything on an exchange, but he starts to learn about various ways to hold coins.. so the more ways that he holds coins, then if some of them are hot or medium, then they might be more vulnerable.. like how much might you hold on your phone for transactions, or maybe you don't hold much, but if you know that you are going to buy some expensive item, then you might carry the bitcoin on your phone for just that transaction.
you might have funds that you keep for transacting to refill your hot wallet or maybe transacting with friends and family (not on the street), so those might be medium storage, even though you still might need to be careful about UTXO management in tersm fo if some folks might see the balances in the wallets that you are using.. or maybe you learn about lightning network wallets and other kinds of wallets, so then you would still consider if those are hot, medium or cold, and surely the cold would have the most security, even though you might need to check in on them from time to time (once or twice a year or maybe more, depending on your situation), to make sure that you still have access to them.. Guys will make varying choices, and sometimes not want to get into too many details about what they do, yet I do sometimes post on coin management topics, and thin that the main idea is that there are likely levels.. and surely if you are buying $10 per week, it might take close to a year before you might feel a need to move those accumulated coins to a private wallet.
Do you think that a person should never invest aggressively in Bitcoin?
Of course a person can buy Bitcoin aggressively. When he is meeting his basic needs very well every month and has a healthy amount of money in his emergency fund, my question to you is why wouldn't a person invest aggressively in Bitcoin? When he sees that investing in Bitcoin is better than other investment areas in many ways.
You said that the evidence is that investing in Bitcoin will cause him to suffer in emergencies. So what is the purpose of an emergency fund?
Again, you said not to invest the entire portion of his discretionary income in Bitcoin. And it seems that a person can sometimes invest the entire portion of his discretionary income in Bitcoin because then he has an emergency fund to meet his needs in emergencies.
Yes, until a person builds a healthy emergency fund, his focus should be on the emergency fund.
There is certainly nothing wrong investing aggressively into bitcoin without overly doing it beyond your Discretionary income in a way that it will not affect your bitcoin investment, most persons buy aggressively because there is dip without any initial budget and get carried away and overly do it without considering if they have the Discretionary income to sustain their bitcoin investment,
so buying aggressively shouldn't be base on their is dip rather than the level of your Discretionary income.So concerning this your last statement that was made bold, is their any valuable reason to be buying aggressively when their is no dip or when you are not lagging behind in your accumulation journey?
The reason most investors buy during a dip is because you can get a lot of unit of Bitcoin at a very cheaper rate, and yes it's true that as you are buying aggressively, as long as it's done within your discretionary income their is no problem about that, but over doing it is where the problem usually is.
The level of bitcoin accumulation aggressiveness is likely due to the strength of your cashflow management and not related to bitcoin price, especially for newbies.. it is better to build systems of ongoing bitcoin accumulation rather than waiting strategies, even though sure, you can purposefully hold some cash on the side for buying dips.. yet it is probably better to have systems in place for that rather than changing levels of aggressiveness based on BTC pricer moves.