The last 3 months in crypto bear — my biggest hits and worst mistakes (Part 3)

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Coinmonks

6 min readJun 29, 2022

What a change it has been since three months ago when I wrote my latest piece on my biggest wins and biggest mistakes investing in crypto! The markets have gone down all the way from near top to new bottoms of the nuclear winter of the bear market.

My performance follows this trend — from being up 40% against BTC*, I am now up 10% only. That’s not a great trajectory by any means, but actually it could have been much worse, given the severity of the recent crash when ETH went all the way down to $800s. The fact that I’m not rekt and still in relative profit is something to be proud of.

Let’s examine my positions a bit closer now —

My top 3 bets

1. MUTANT APE YACHT CLUB (NFT)

R multiple: 2.64 (including $APE & Otherdeed airdrops)
Overall gain: 39% of portfolio (all included)
Time held: 7 months

Holding these has been my wildest ride so far — putting me from -6% of portfolio as of writing in October ’21, all the way to +39% as of now. I am very glad I have followed my hunch and sold all the airdrops as well as the Apes near the top in May, putting me at an almost 100 ETH (fully realized) profit! More on that here.

This single bet has basically saved my whole portfolio — otherwise I would have been down against BTC badly. That’s also a warning shot for the future — I got as much lucky as I got skilled.

2. NIFTY ISLAND

R multiple: 2.09
Overall gain: 11.74% of portfolio
Time held: 11 months

I have written about this one in my article from 9 months ago, so I will skip going into detail again. That said, my relative profit has gone down slightly since then as I haven’t sold everything — which is something I should have done right away, near the top.

3. CAKE

R multiple: 2.23
Overall gain: 8.26% of portfolio
Time held: 13 months

I have written about this one 9 months ago too, so I will also skip details. The same lesson applies as does for Nifty Island — I should have sold everything when the price was booming, my profits would have been higher.

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All in all, it’s interesting to see that the top performers have not changed much since writing both three and nine months ago (save for the Apes!), giving me around one true hit per quarter. This is something to be aware of when projecting my bets. Also, the power law still applies — my fourth best bet is almost 3x less profitable than number three.

My worst 3 bets

1. ETH

R multiple: -0.09
Overall loss: 15.12% of portfolio
Time held: 1 year+

This is the Mutant Ape Yacht Club story in reverse. Ethereum has gone from my second most profitable bet 3 months ago to my biggest loser. Why? Simply because of its relatively deeper slump compared to Bitcoin in this recent bear market, and the size of my position.

That said, this is no reason to panic, I continue holding as I believe ETH will reclaim its relative dominance and then some. Also, have I not sold so much of my other holdings into ETH just before the May slump happened, I would have had a few other much more badly losing positions.

2. Fortune Media NFT

R multiple: -0.64
Overall loss: 11.43% of portfolio
Time held: 11months

Not much to add here. The biggest loser from 3 months ago keeps handing around at number 2. The relative loss has become slightly more severe, as the overall value of my portfolio has gone down in this bear market.

3. Eponym NFT

R multiple: -0.88
Overall loss: 4.91% of portfolio
Time held: 8.5 months

My third biggest loss is still my third biggest loss, no surprise there. The loss has actually deepened, as the price of Eponym has continued to decline. That’s ok though, as explained in my last post, this is a passion purchase of mine and I’m ready to ride it all the way to zero, if need be.

Conclusion

Due to the sudden onset of a deep bear market following the unfortunate events in May, my overall performance this quarter has been negative. That said, having sold my most valuable NFTs and some of my fungible tokens into ETH right before the biggest slump has been a godsend — trust your gut feeling, sell into exuberance, and always take profits have proven to be mantras that I need to keep living by.

Other than that, I believe patience and long-term thinking are still the key — I only get a real hit every few months, which is more than enough, if I don’t lose too much money on the rest. Also, the biggest losers can become the biggest winners if conviction held, and vice versa.

As a bonus, I have compiled this list of my biggest mistakes to date, for your enjoyment. No matter what, avoid, avoid, avoid!:

Position too big (ie lost 10% on Fortune NFT)
FOMO after rapid price movement instead of waiting for a correction (ie go long on ETH at $4k in Oct’21, short too aggressively after 50% price drop in 1 week in Jun‘22 instead of short after the relief rally)
Validation bias instead of taking profits (ie keep adding to short position after it has gone rapidly into 40% profit in about a week in Jun’22, instead of take profit and re-open position after the relief rally)
Move all at once instead of DCA (ie convert 2% to BANK in one go, instead of in 0.5% increments)
Moving too slow (ie observing for too long and missing a sudden pump instead of making a token investment to start off)
Inverted risk-reward ratio (ie risk 90% of capital by leveraging ETH for 3% portfolio gains, risk a 30% depeg from ETH on stETH, for a 4% APR)
Leverage (of any kind)
Thinking too short term (ie looking at 4-hour charts instead of 3-month charts and disregarding what’s going to happen in the medium term)
Not having any cash-on-hand for DCA, living & business expenses

*Note:

I denominate all my profit & loss against Bitcoin, as I don’t ever sell back into fiat. Therefore, all % gains and losses are against BTC, not USD. This makes it much harder to record relative profits, but also obliterates most of the market-wide volatility. Likewise, all the R multiples above are in BTC terms. This means if, say, the R multiple is 3.88 — after selling my position back into BTC, I’ve received 4.88 times as many Bitcoin as I initially put in.

To learn more about my journey in crypto, check my other articles on here or ➡️ follow me on twitter 🐦. Feel free to clap if you like this article -

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