Quote from: Fievel on September 13, 2017, 08:02:11 AM

Hey guys, new member here

I've been watching Bitcoin's development since early August this year, and I finally gave in and bought 1 BTC for $4600. I didn't wait because I figured the value could easily break the $5000 barrier at any time, and if the price would suddenly normalize above that level, 1 BTC would be outside my budget.

I probably went OCD on the matter and should've waited instead of having to have 1 full BTC, especially since the ICO-related news from China were still pretty recent.

Anyway: the 2nd wave of news regarding shutdown of local exchanges hit hours after I made the purchace, and the value plummeted (it's now hovering just above $4000, that's a 13% decrease). Lesson learned I guess. I've been lurking on the forums for a couple of months trying to pick up some sound advice from you guys, and from what I've gathered I should stick with holding for 5-10 years instead of panicking. But honestly, it's tough to ride the lows.

Any words of encouragement? Grin

I guess I'm not the only one who've had a nervous start in the world of cryptocurrencies. Anyone else feeling like they "need" to acquire 1 BTC before the train leaves the station for good?

Lesson learned, it's always better to be greedy when others are afraid, but only when others are afraid.

The trouble, of course, is telling the difference. Buying on a rush of bullish sentiment on seeing the $5000 mark is an easy mistake to make, you don't want to miss out on all the profits. That makes you become one of the profits, unfortunately, at least in the short-term. If you're confident enough about your trading abilities, you can sell and try to time the market so that you buy back in when it's rebounding; that could work out great, if this bear run reaches its projected low at $3164, or not so great at all if it's nearly done already and you end up buying high after selling low. IMO now that bitcoin has broken out of its recent "coil" formation (several days of higher highs and lower lows) to a more standard bear market formation of lower highs and lower lows, we can be fairly confident that it's going to last at least a little while, but the question is how much further it's going to fall, or for that matter if it's going to fall further at all. The news that North Korea is using bitcoin to avoid UN sanctions could cause more regulatory hammers to fall, in which case it would probably crash pretty hard as people take their money out for fear of having it trapped in exchanges that are shut down - breaking news of China's ban on exchanges being just a rumor after all, on the other hand, might very well restart the bull market. Obviously I'm not confident enough in my trading abilities to time this market. Tongue

If you're willing to lose what you've invested, keep holding on. This is not an uncertain market caused by community differences, which can be easily solved just by bitcoiners agreeing; this is the point where bitcoin is drawing lots of notice from the powers that be. If they don't decide that it's too inconvenient and crush the burgeoning enthusiasm with regulatory burdens beyond what's necessary, it has a lot more growth potential. If it's wrapped around with lots of pointless red tape, or just banned entirely from even more major exchange countries, it could end up being worth the paper it's written on. That's a choice only you can make as an investor. Ideally, you already made that choice before investing, but of course it's easier to make that choice when everything's sunny and it looks like you'll end up being another of the overnight millionaires you hear so much about. What you don't hear as much about are the people who supplied those millions of dollars to the market's liquidity and then ended up cutting their losses early, because they were afraid of losing it all. This could be another of those situations very easily - it only takes a little bit of different news to change people's moods about speculative markets, given the herd mentality you tend to see with these things. If you read back in the forums, people had this discussion every time bitcoin hit a new high - is it time to sell now? Is this as far as it'll ever go? It wasn't, obviously. Personally, I'm holding on to what I have, but I'm not quite confident enough that this is the end of the bear run to buy more. Dunno if it helps you at all, hearing about why and how I'm ambivalent. Tongue

It's not an easy choice, if you care about losing that initial investment.

Cormoran

Posts

Merits