Yesterday, I told you of my first entry into the suicidal amazing world of trading! Then, I went for a mini-vacation for a week, and I couldn't update you on it!
I will do it now, so you can get to learn as I fail and cry learn and contemplate from my journeys into this world! Hopefully, you won’t do the same mistakes I did – or at least get a good laugh out of it, and maybe even give me a hand if you want!
Let’s get started, shall we?
1 – The shop is set up! Time to buy!
As we left off from this stupid story exciting tale, I had just gotten an exchange service which I could use to buy Bitcoin using SBD (or Steem, thanks to my friend hereby known as D).
That Bitcoin would value and take me straight to the moon once it reached for the $6k, which I believed would shortly follow after $5k.
So, I stupidly boldly sank the SBD I had on hand into Bitcoin, thanks to Bittrex, and calmly waited for the moon rocket to fire. I bought when Bitcoin was around $4800...
…And you know what happened next.
2 – Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
Yeah.
I’m gonna be honest – my most scientific explanation on why the market decided that $5k was a good time to crash is this – the market decided that I can’t have nice things.
Other than that, I suppose China’s crackdown on ICO’s, a simple adjustment after a historic high value, a crash of the entire crypto market, and the instability of achieving many record highs in a row made it so that Bitcoin’s value quickly plummeted. Which is sad for my portfolio, which to the moment consists of only bitcoin, ffs.
Still. Any trader worth his salt knows that there is no point in lamenting mistakes right? Just sell your coins and buy at a better time, right?
…Yeah. I wasn’t really in a position to do that.
3 – There’s no time to vacation like before, after, and during a crash
Except for when you get to do it at all those 3 times!
You see, I went on vacation the day after I bought into Bitcoin. During that vacation, my Internet access was limited. As such, I could only refresh Coindesk’s page a couple of times a day, cursing the market for going into the perfect position right when I had no way of buying or selling.
I had no way of accessing my Bittrex account from the limited Internet that I had. As such, I saw the crash go by without being able to buy more Bitcoin, now that it was the perfect time.
…Still some pretty sweet vacation time though, I gotta admit. And now that I’m back, hope spring eternal once again – the conversion process is complete. I can now use my Steem to truly get into this business, and sink or swim trading in other cryptos other than Bitcoin.
And I will be doing that… next time.
Lessons Learned
The only way to truly fail is to learn nothing, from what I believe. As such, I’m now gonna try to break down what I did right and wrong in every part of my investments, so I can stick with what works and avoid what doesn’t!
The lessons here are twofold – first, after an investment in something that is wildly changing in value each day, you should be willing to adjust your expectations and either buy or sell depending on how the market changes next.
Second, in the event that you’ll soon not have access to your exchange service, either opt out of trading altogether, or make sure your investment is stable – you don’t want to lose 20% just because you couldn’t sell on time.
Missing out on such a good opportunity to buy also stung like hell - always be ready to capitalize on such good changes in the market.
That wraps this up!
So, I was pretty salty while this was happening, but I remembered one little thing – if I had invested all my SBD prior to the crash, I would’ve lost a much bigger amount of money than I actually did. D, I truly thank you. I choose to believe that you knew this would happen and where a genius in foresight!... totally.
Join me in my next exciting installment of Adventures of a Crypto Noob, where I will hopefull continue making more stupid mistakes, so both of us can learn from them!
If you have some feedback, suggestions to help me improve, or just wanna tell me what you thought of this piece, sound off in the comments below!
Till the next guys! Steem on!