That was the reply someone made in March 2020 in the stellar.public #general Keybase channel, to a person asking "what happened to the price of XLM (Stellar Lumens)?" I was lurking in that channel because - like a lot of other people - I'd been airdropped XLM as a Keybase user in late 2019. On this day, like every other day, I was very busy with work, on a deadline, with a task bigger than the deadline. But I did take a moment to look at my Keybase wallet, and I sucked my breath in at the opportunity. My little stake of XLM was the very lowest I'd ever seen it.
This was the overall sentiment of the crypto market's participants: panic, expressed in a single value: a price at a point in time. Now.
Bottom-picking, sort of...
I'd been here before. I'd seen it my first time, when I was old enough to appreciate it, and with just a scrap enough of money to act on it. In the late 1990's I witnessed Asian_financial_crisis. My dad had a small account with Scudder mutual funds. I called them up about opening an account for myself.
The representative told me I needed $1000 or $2000 (I don't recall exactly) to open an account. I'd had my first job out of school for seven whole years, but was paying off my car, paying extra on my mortgage and student loans, and was supporting my sister and Dad, so I didn't have much money left over. I didn't have a thousand dollars available to open the account.
But there was another option. If I agreed to invest $100 per month via ACH withdrawal from my bank, I didn't have to meet a minimum opening balance with Scudder. I could do that, and jumped on it.
My next sentence flabbergasted the representative. I wanted to invest in the Scudder Asia Fund, which of course was at that moment begin to slide down a slope. He asked me several times "why," and "are you sure?" I said I was, and asked him, "Aren't we supposed to buy low and sell high? Is Asia never going to recover? Do you think they'll be in the same boat in five years? Ten years?"
I don't remember exactly what he said, but he seemed impressed by the plan, and puzzled he'd never thought of that before.
To make a long story short, I sold the whole position several years later for a tidy profit, after buying $100 each month, visualizing a low, wide bowl, with the majority of my share purchases made at the wide bottom, over years.
Bottom-picking, again...
Years later, in February 2009, in the aftermath aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, at the regular Wednesday meeting of the business networking group I was in, I told everyone, "The markets are down too far to stay here long. It's like a rubber band stretched to the limit. This is the safest time to start putting money into the markets that you can afford to risk." One person told me a few years later he'd made $40,000 because he acted on that advice. But I did not, for reasons you're about to discover.
"All the Alts are down."
By now, in 2020, I'd spent years pouring myself into my job, to the exclusion of everything else. I was on that tight deadline; this work had to be done by the end of the month. As much as my nose smelled opportunity, the habit of retreating to work for validation, the habit of just working, my concerns over getting the job done, my concerns over the growing sense of uncertainty - actually, certainty, in my mind - about the magnitude of what the pandemic was going to mean to people, their health, and the economy; all conspired to keep me from looking further into the opportunity and act.
I focused on the sentence: "all the alts are down," and never looked at the price of Bitcoin or Ether. I had enough money sitting in a stupid checking account, earning zero interest, to buy four or five Bitcoin that March, after paying cash for a used car (didn't want to, but had to: hydroplaned on a wet curve and totaled the poor thing).
Think about that. I sure do. Not only did I not buy any Bitcoin or Ether, but I didn't buy more XLM, or anything at all. I'd had a Coinbase account since November 2019, when I'd bought my first $50 worth of Bitcoin, and I didn't even know how cheap everything was in March! I knew that I should look, because I saw that stash of XLM at less than the price of a two-person lunch.
(Not) staying focused
I retreated moments later into work, and spend most of the next several weeks there. Instead of investing, I spent what spare time I did have on a program to scrape the state's Department of Health website to collect COVID-19 data, because at the time they hadn't started providing downloadable datasets, and there was no other way to observe data over time. I didn't know until later others were working on collecting that data and providing it. I didn't have to do any of it.
I spent my time allowing fear or concern or whatever to distract me from my previously proven ability to identify near market bottoms. At the very least, I've been able to spot several good entry points.
A post in May from @lukestokes got me through the process of getting a wallet that supported FIO names, so I had made some small purchases since then, but they'd been few and far between. Few and far between partly because usability stinks for most things crypto for people have normal lives, who aren't living and breathing it, but largely because of how I spent my time. I can't forget my mother-in-law was in a nursing home during lockdown, and passed away in May. I've no regrets for where my mind was spending much of its time then.
At any rate, I finally had some time off in October, and started researching and buying in earnest. Again, in November, and December. More time off, with full-time research and purchases. Trying to make up for lost time. You can imagine how that feels.
Fin
It could have been so much easier, with a little more attention, years ago, a little more balance in my life between what work needs from me, and what I need to give myself and family.
I don't know if posting this is a good idea or not, if it's even remotely helpful, but I can say every word is true (unless I've made a true error, in which case I'm happy to be corrected).
There's more to this story, because like everyone else here, I'm on a journey. I really don't know what to say beyond that at the moment, except, assuming you've read this far, thanks for sticking through to the end! :-) Advice, questions, comments, reprimands, encouragement are all welcome. I'm here to learn, not just rant and pontificate.
All the best to you.