Been a little while so lets jump right in with some quick updates:
As predicted by pretty much everyone except for the Federal Reserve, all that money printing during covid has come back around to kick us in the ass. Hard. Inflation is of course WAY up and stocks are way down. Turns out printing trillions of dollars and handing it out like you're a rich family in the suburbs on Halloween has consequences. Who knew!? The Fed has been hiking the federal funds rate and is promising to keep raising it until inflation cools off. Once again, the Federal Reserve lurches us from one catastrophe to another. Rates really should never have been as low as they were in the first place, but here we are. By the way, on the topic of the Fed, I have a rare book recommendation for anyone reading this. I seriously cannot recommend this book any harder. "The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin. Stop what you're doing right now and just order it on Amazon. I promise, it's not nearly as dry as it sounds. It's one of those books that makes you stop every couple pages and think about what you just read. The American people have been getting raw dogged by the Federal Reserve and bankers since its inception (and even before that) and it's truly mind blowing how they're able to get away with it. And people not only don't really understand what's going on, they support it! Every time I see a "support Ukraine!" thing I want to vomit. Might as well tag yourself "free use" (look it up, sicko). If you have any interest in money, investing, history, the creation of money and wealth, etc., then this book is for you. Seriously. Read it. I know you probably haven't read a book in a while so it'll be good for you.
Now let's talk a little crypto. Currently bitcoin is trading right around 20k and ethereum is around 1325. We're officially in bear market/accumulation phase and I have been accumulating. I've done a good job of selling tops and buying dips so even though my first buys were around 40k, my average bitcoin price is 23k. So I'm still in the red with BTC but not too bad and certainly not nearly as bad as it would be if I never sold anything. My average buy price is 35k and average sell price is 44.3k. I'm working my way to owning a full bitcoin which I will absolutely have by the next bull run.
I've actually done an even better job trading ETH. My overall average price on ETH is 1350 so I'm just about even. My average buy price is 1922 and my sell price is 2400. I have just shy of 4 "ethers". My general strategy is pretty simple: buy some on red days, sell some on green days. It's amazing how the general public seems to get this backwards. People pile in when an asset starts ripping, then lose their nerve and sell when it drops. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of what you want to do. If you're in crypto or you've been on sidelines watching, I think the time to buy is now. It could still go lower and I actually do think it will, but forget about trying to time the bottom. Just buy a little bit every week or so and hold on to it. And whatever you do, don't sell it at a loss.
While I consider myself a borderline BTC maxi, I have ventured into investing in a few alt coins (besides ETH which I don't even really consider an alt-coin anymore). My third biggest holding is Chainlink (LINK). Chainlink is a layer two, smart contract platform that runs on the ethereum network. Its major use case is translating real world data onto the blockchain. I love the functionality and use cases for Link, but it's "tokennomics" are concerning. There's no max supply (my favorite thing about BTC) and I keep reading things about the developers creating and selling Link coins. I started buying Link when it was in the 30's but with selling tops I've managed to get my average price to 17. It's currently trading at around 7.5 right now so I'm in the red pretty bad with it. I think Link is a good sleeper coin though so I'm not too concerned. It also tends to do pretty good in bear markets compared to other alt-coins.
The other two alt coins I have are Litecoin and Polygon (aka Matic). Neither of these two coins interest me really, except for the fact that their prices move a ton so it's pretty easy to trade. I aggressively take profits with alt-coins, so any rally's I sell a ton and then it's pretty easy to buy it back a lower price. Look at the price action with Chainlink over the past few months. It goes up then down then back up to pretty predictable levels. I've been buying Link at 7 and selling at 7.5 and up for months now. Same thing with Matic. I don't care at all about the future of Matic or litecoin, so taking profits with them is easy. My average price for litecoin is 49 and Matic is .8.
Another thing I like doing and wish I had thought of earlier is trading crypto's for each other. Take a look at charts that show btc/eth, or btc/link, or eth/link, etc, and you can see some pretty clear channels of support and resistance. For instance, my average price for buying BTC and selling ETH is .0731 (in bitcoin), and my average price for buying ETH and selling BTC is .067. As long as the first number is bigger than the second one, it's free money. I'm only up a small amount with 'inter-cryto' trading but I made a few mistakes at the start. It's not something that came to me right away though and I suspect the same thing for other people. So if you are in this space it's definitely something to consider.
I think predicting future price moves is largely a fools errand, but for what it's worth, I do think there is one more leg down to go for crypto. I think the bottom is not quite yet in, but of course I could be wrong. I think BTC will bottom somewhere around 13-15k, hover around 20k for another year or so, then start ripping. The bear market will probably last until the Fed starts to pivot which I don't think we'll see anytime soon. I wouldn't wait around for that though and I'm sticking to my plan to keep DCA'ing in.
My venture into the stock market was ill timed but I've been slowly buying at these depressed prices. I also expect the stock market to keep dipping, so I'm DCA'ing in there too. My general stock "thesis" is Tesla, mushroom stocks, Amazon and a few other small ones. I have some European power supply companies on my watchlist that I'm just waiting for a big red day to jump into. They've been going up lately though so I hope I didn't miss it. I'm way more invested and interested in crypto over stocks, but stocks are fun too. Stonks.
Personally, I recently got married which is nice. We also sold our house in late August which literally felt like getting out at the perfect time. We didn't have to buy a house immediately either, so if the real estate market goes through a 25% or so correction in the next year or so, we'll have really timed this out perfect. By the way, our house sold in less than a week and we got almost 10% OVER asking. Want to know how many offers we got? One. One offer, way over asking. Talk about top of the market.
And since I know many of you got here from my sports betting days, I have to admit somewhat somberly, I think my sports betting days are largely behind me. I still have active accounts and I still put in some action and stay involved with getting other people accounts, but that particular fire in me has been put out. I know what it takes to win at sports betting and I just don't have it in me anymore. My models are still profitable so if anyone out there is reading this and is interested in my offer to sell them and walk through how to use them, now would be the time to do it. I'll still have some updates regarding sports and who knows, maybe I will get back in seriously. But with work and now crypto and stocks, my mind and my heart are just not fully in it when it comes to sports. I remember getting that fuzzy, warm feeling when props would get released for the day, or getting a new juicy account. And sorry to say, it just ain't there for me anymore. I will definitely get back in on political betting though. 2020 political betting was probably the most fun I've ever had betting. This time around though I'll definitely get a PredictIt account and really do it right.
Like everyone else I suppose, I'm mostly just watching America crumble into a pile of ashes right before our eyes. It's weird. We're all just like watching TV and eating lunch like "yea, empires don't last forever." I really do wonder what life will be like 50 years from now. I think it's either we're on Mars or fighting a civil war with 3D printed guns. Maybe I'll get more into that for my next post. I think I'll stop here. Thanks for reading, talk soon!
(P.S. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, leave a comment with a joke in it so I know you're not a bot and I'll find you.)
