Relief Bounce? (alternate title: Jacks Misery)

Oh how sentiment can change so quickly in this space. For the record I don't know which way we are headed. My plan has not changed though; I am operating on a two to five year timeframe and heavily focused on the Stacks ecosystem. This article is one of the very first I wrote on Sigle, and goes into my plan just a bit. What I can say for certain is that I am happy that I stuck with my conviction and was able to gain a good amount of Stacks exposure this past couple of months. These market conditions remind me of a story that even I can find the humor in in retrospect, so I am sure you may find it humorous as well. As a bonus, if you pay attention you may learn something. So without further ado, lets take a trip back to June 2019.

No education is free

At this point I had been paying my dues by getting mercilessly chopped up in my first crypto bear market (sound familiar?). I had been spending a lot of effort in learning how to trade, and I did most of this trading on an exchange known as Bitmex. The vast majority of my learning at this time involved me getting mercilessly liquidated and then revenge trading in futile attempts to make it all back. By now I had started to learn an effective way for me to manage risk. I began starting my positions with smaller size. It was during this month that I started a Bitcoin long around 8k, my initial entry was $300.

This entry proved to be quite successful and it didn't take long for me to move my stop loss into profit. I had found myself with an entire week off work, and this would provide me with a lot of free time to stare at the chart.

Every day I found myself able to increase leverage, add some principal, and just keep building this trade. Before long I was up significantly, and it appeared as though my goal to finally own an entire bitcoin was within reach. I had finally become the master that I knew I always would be...

Before long it was time to go back to work. I had a 2.5hr commute and an open trade that was deep in profit. So I started the journey, obsessively looking at my phone, managing the VPN through dead spots, all while managing to not run my car into a ditch. Then it happened......my balance was exactly 1 whole Bitcoin. I was ecstatic, we had just broke 13k on price and I just knew we were going straight back to 20k. All of the hard work had finally paid off, I was going to make it!

I arrived at work around 0640 and had to put my phone away. The start of a shift is always hectic, and at this particular hospital you had to hit the floor running. It was nearly 0830 before I had the opportunity to check my phone again. When I did, my heart sank clean through the floor and into the bowels of the earth where it was immediately consumed by some interdimensional ghoul. I had been liquidated. It wasn't in fact a ghoul that had done me in, but an even more feared entity that you could frequently find on the Bitmex exchange. The dreaded Bart pattern. In my exuberance, hubris, greed, and fatigue I had opted to not take profits or even adjust my stop loss. I was so far into profit I just knew that my liquidation price was secure.

Heartbreak.

The takeaways

Just read again, this should serve as instructional manual on how not to trade. I used too much leverage, I overdosed on hopium, and not taking profit are all lessons that I have had to learn ( even to this day). I let myself feel bad for a while, deposited another $300 into Deribit and managed to make an even more impressive trade...but this is a story for another day.

Risk management needs to be a key part of your plan in this game. Another big takeaway is to accept the fact that you are going to lose from time to time, but if you want to be great you have to keep trying until you get good. This applies to everything in life.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this time that I owned a bitcoin for a couple of hours. I can laugh about it now, but in reality getting liquidated is a horrible experience. I don't trade with high leverage anymore, and I haven't used leverage during this bear market. Conditions have to be very specific for me to utilize this tool, because that is exactly what it is...a tool. Conceptualizing leverage as a way to get rich quick is more than likely going to lead to loss of funds and a case of the blues that would make any Mississippi Delta bluesman envious.

In other news this blog is nearing 1,000 total visitors...thank you! To celebrate this event I will be giving one of my Explorers away to one of my followers. Be on the lookout for the Twitter post that will qualify you for entry. I even have a plan for when I reach my next metric, and this one is going to be exceptionally fun. So do me a solid and help me get the word out. This endeavor has become quite the passion of mine, and my goal is to be able to spend even more time pursuing it.

I don't have anything else to say for now, thanks for reading. Until next time, Jack.

*The easiest way to DCA your Stacks here