I made pretty much every single stupid mistake possible and when I look back I just want to kick myself in the ass. That said, feel free to laugh at my stupid mistakes, but hopefully learn a thing or two and not make the same mistakes that I did.
In May I bought a significant amount of Bitcoin (just over 500 coins). I really had faith in the technology and in the future of Bitcoin. My plan was to hold them forever as pretty much everywhere I looked, analysts were predicting great things and I really felt that it would easily hit somewhere over $10K before the end of 2017. If I had done the right thing and HODL then I would be sitting pretty with a huge profit, but obviously I didn’t do that. I started to read about altcoins and some of the incredible profits people were booking just by doing some short term trading. I decided the action was too hot to dismiss so I started off with Antshares (now re-branded as NEO, obviously not a very good sign). I put 10 Bitcoins in to Antshares and within 3 days it had gone up enough that I had made around 10 grand. I thought there was no way that I could see that kind of growth and profit just sticking to Bitcoin so I came up with a new strategy. I would buy altcoin low and sell high, because I figured that was the easiest thing in the world to do. It really did seem like a pretty foolproof strategy. Especially as long as I didn’t panic and I made sure to HODL.
By the time the end of June rolled around I had invested almost all of my Bitcoin into altcoin. Initially it just kept going up and up. I was in heaven and I literally thought the sky was the limit. There are a lot of things I should have done differently, like keeping more in Bitcoin, like slowly booking some of my altcoin profits and transferring back into Bitcoin or maybe just researching the altcoins I was putting my money into. I didn’t do any of those things and it cost me. I won’t give you the full list of all the altcoins I bought and how much each of them lost, but just know that the average altcoin I put money into lost about 60% of its value and after pouring around 500 BTC into altcoins I now have a value of about 100 BTC.
I’m sure many people might be asking why I didn’t put in stop losses, or why I didn’t book profits or why moved over so much money into altcoins in the first place. The one and only answer is GREED. I thought it would just keep going up and I was too stupid to put any kind of security in place in the off chance that it didn’t. I know how stupid this was and how stupid I am.
I still kept all the altcoins even though they are at a loss. Once they started going down, I knew the only response was to HODL and just pray that they would go back up. Even though though I am so tempted to sell them all and stop any future losses. I’m just hoping that they will get back to the original value, so I don’t need to take the huge losses. I know that BItcoin is still THE investment for the future and I would do anything to go back and undo those trades where I gave away my BTC for nothing.