The last 6 months in crypto — my biggest hits and worst mistakes

Published in

Coinmonks

11 min readOct 8, 2021

It’s time to look back at my trading and investing record this year and evaluate what’s been working and what has not. Overall I’m 21.76% up against BTC, which I call a success. Not all of my bets have been good ones though -

My top 3 bets

1. TITAN

R multiple: 11.24
Overall gain: 2.16% of portfolio
Time held: 6.5 weeks in total

This is a funny one. I knew the Iron Titanium ‘stablecoin’ project was a ponzi scheme in disguise as soon as I saw it. Hence I did not invest. Two weeks later, I get a text from my friend saying that the price of TITAN just collapsed to almost zero after a near vertical run upwards (it turns out there was a ‘bank run’ which triggered the downward spiral). I rush to my computer and check the new price (see above).

I do a quick calculation and figure out that the new market cap is about $1M (down from a few hundred million, if not a billion). I smell opportunity. Even if the protocol is finished, there is a chance that the developers will announce some kind of compensation or attempt to revive it, which will bring the price up slightly, at least in the short run. Something similar has previously happened to PancakeBunny.

I ape in and I buy $1.000 worth of this token. My thesis proves right — I flip most of the token within the next month. The biggest mistake? I should have sold earlier (at its peak right after the rebound, my R multiple was almost 100x). I should also have bought more. Had I invested 2% of my portfolio in this, as per my standard position sizing now and sold earlier, I could have doubled my portfolio size, on this trade alone.

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2. Nifty Island

R multiple: 3.88
Overall gain: 14.97% of portfolio
Time held: 2–4 weeks + ongoing

This was an early bet. Nifty Island is still in its pre-release stage. They have been focusing on building a community on discord, which I think they have been doing a great job at. I first hopped into their discord after I listened to a podcast with the founder Charles, on Zima Red. I was impressed with Charles’ take on the whole metaverse space, which I found insightful and refreshing, compared to a lot of the others.

Shortly after I joined the discord, Nifty airdropped palm NFTs onto the community. They look nice. I didn’t engage much so I got an Iron Palm (the lowest tier). Palms started trading on Opensea and I managed to buy two additional Silver ones at 0.5 ETH each, and a Gold one at 1 ETH, before there was any real market for either.

A few weeks after this the team announced they will be airdropping Blades on palm holders and the prices shot up, basically overnight. I observed, placed some sell orders… and waited. I managed to eventually sell a Silver Palm for 9.8 ETH and my Gold Palm for 19.8 ETH. That’s an almost 20x return on each. I reinvested some of the proceeds into buying another Iron Palm and one extra Blade so my position is still open with five Nifty artefacts (which is partly a testament to my faith in this project). That said, I’ve already made more on the two sales than I put in in total, so my net cost is -21 ETH. Not too shabby!

3. CAKE

R multiple: 2.40
Overall gain: 11.95% of portfolio
Time held: 6 months, ongoing

Cake, sweet cake! I started to build a sizeable position (larger than I should have) in March, amidst the BSC yield farming craze. DeFi on Binance Smart Chain was clearly getting all the mainstream attention Ethereum was not, yet its main decentralised exchange PancakeSwap was valued several times less than Ethereum’s Uniswap. Even when adjusting for the lower TVL, it still seemed a bargain. Plus, CAKE allowed single-asset staking with over 100% APR at that time. A no brainer!

The price of CAKE started to climb up against BTC almost immediately after I bought. I was happy with my farming yields so I did not start to sell any significant amount until late August / September, after the price has corrected somewhat and it became painfully obvious (at least to me) that, based on usage trends, developer activity, and centralisation concerns, Binance Smart Chain is not the future (at least for the most part). I’ve ended up reducing my portion of CAKE down to 2% of my portfolio (it reached over 10% at its peak), pocketing some juicy returns, on the way!

My worst 3 bets (so far)

1. SUNDER

R multiple: -0.93 (and counting — ride or die, lol)
Overall loss: 0.82% of portfolio
Time held: 3.5 months and counting

My. Worst. Bet. Ever. Full stop. I knew this shitcoin was a no-go the moment I read its litepaper. This was a few days before Sunder was set to be one of the first (if not the first) tokens to do an Initial Farm Offering on Sushi’s newly introduced Miso platform. The mistake: I was greedy. I thought ‘oh my God, the first IFO on this platform, people will ape in and it’s gonna rocket.’ For context, this was in June, still amidst the ICO mania where tokens on platforms like Coinlist or Binance Launchpad did exactly this.

I can tell you now, rocket it did not. Following a short and barely significant spike upwards, the token followed a path of steady decline of 93% to date, and ongoing. I missed the initial spike as I was out on a date and returned about two hours after the token started to trade publicly. Clearly a mistake. Not sure I would have sold anyways. I did not sell after, waiting for the product to actually launch, hoping the price might recover. The market cap is relatively small and my position is not large, so I’m ok riding it down all the way to zero, should I need to.

Lessons learned? Don’t ape into stuff you don’t believe in, just because you think others are likely to ape in too. Trust your instinct when reading whitepapers. Don’t be greedy. When something is a long shot, it’s better to wait and make another, more appropriate bet later. I should be comfortable sitting on my chips and waiting. Silver lining? This reckless loss was a wake up call for me to invest a lot of effort into better recording and monitoring my positions, resulting in the system I am using now.

2. BELT

R multiple: -0.54 (and counting)
Overall loss: 0.97% of portfolio
Time held: 5 months and counting

Don’t trust 160% APRs. Ever. Belt seemed like a great DeFi protocol on the surface and under the hood — top 5 TVL on Binance Smart Chain, a nice UI, a unique take on distributed single-token staking, and an experienced team. The leading yield aggregator on Ethereum (Yearn) had a market cap over $1 billion, whereas Belt’s was 10x lower. Juicy triple-digit APYs for staking it in the WBNB-BELT auto-compounding pool. No brainer?

Not so much. Belt price collapsed significantly following the crypto crash in May and then kept sliding on and on (it still does). Other than the relative decline of the importance of BSC, I believe this is due to the excessive emission of new BELT (over 1.000% new supply / per year at time of my investment, now down to probably 200–300%, relative to existing supply). I knew this but thought it wouldn’t matter too much in the context of DeFi’s and BSC’s meteoric growth. Well, turns out it does.

Lesson learnt? Consider token minting and vesting schedules when investing. Also, don’t make one-on-one price comparisons of similar products across different blockchains, without understanding the limitations and narrative around each, in enough detail.

3. Mutant Ape Yacht Club

R multiple: -0.37 (and counting)
Overall loss: 5.97% of portfolio
Time held: 1 month and counting

This ugly mother***ing mutant has become synonymous with my online presence now

This one is a funny story. It is the biggest total loss I’ve recorded on my balance sheet to date, although I’m hoping it will turn around. MAYC was an airdrop on the existing holders of Bored Apes, announced last minute. I wasn’t aware of it, my friend (not the same one) has texted me about this at 11.30pm on a Thursday, just as I was about to go to bed. ‘Apes?’ I thought. This could be too interesting not to check out.

And so I did. I took my laptop to bed and before I knew it, I spent two hours scrolling through Opensea and rarity.tools, immersed in trying to figure out which one of the freshly dropped floor Apes are rare enough and a good buy. I bought one, then another, then a third one. I loved the way they looked (more than the original Bored Apes) and their floor price (about 7 ETH at that time) was about 15% of the floor price of the original Apes. The Mutants are meant to enable more people to enter the Club and they look great, so I was sure (and still largely am) that their price will converge much closer to the price of Bored Apes, over time.

The problem is that I aped in too much, too fast, investing over 10% of my portfolio into this project, all at once (I did end up buying a third, much rare Ape in the series at 18 ETH, later the same night). I was confident about it, as the project just dropped without a prior announcement, was famous, and would most likely shoot up instantly, allowing me to sell at least a couple of them quickly. The price did go up somewhat over the next 1 or 2 days but then started to decline sharply, as the whole NFT market dipped.

Mind that I bought the Apes on the 30th of August, which was one day after Cryptopunks floor reached its All Time High at around 140 ETH, before correcting downwards to 75 (now it’s back north of 100 ETH). Needless to say, the rest of the NFT market went down with it and is now still somewhat depressed. Similar to Sunder, my mistake was greed, even though in this case I did not lack conviction in the product.

Nevertheless, the position was too large (several times over) and I failed to account for the NFT macro context. Sure, I got unlucky that the drop happened at literally the worst time possible in the market cycle, but this is a good teacher. For now, I keep holding my Apes, expecting my thesis to still hold and the price to recover, relative to the rest of the market. In the meantime, I’ve grown increasingly attached to my profile pic rare Ape, after I’ve been using it on discord and twitter, and it’s become the subject of the first meme, created by someone else!

Conclusion

All in all, I am over 21% in profit against Bitcoin compared to March so I can’t complain. I have reviewed my positions and partly sold some winners, also absorbed some losses. As a result, I am relatively confident in the vast majority of my positions, even if they are currently in a minus (with a few exceptions). My relative profits should trend higher, as the overall crypto market recovers.

What’s also notable is that my largest wins are (in absolute terms) much larger than my largest losses, even though the total number of my losses is larger than the total number of my wins. This is a very good sign and the way it should be. As long as I can keep my position sizing right, I should be able to minimize my downside to keep playing the game VC-style — ie 2–3 of my biggest wins will absorb all 20 of my losses and then some handsome profit on top.

Let’s just keep the lessons above in mind and do even better, in the next two quarters. Onwards and upwards!

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 -