Don’t Forget to Take Profits in a Bull Run

I've seen a few bull runs in my crypto days and they're exhilarating. It's not the making money that I like but the feeling smart. Your bags turn into assets and your assets turn into golden eggs. Your Delta keeps pinging with updates – +5%, +15%, +33%.

At times like this, you see your portfolio going up and up and up until the numbers become almost meaningless. Maybe once you said you'd sell when BTC was $20,000 but suddenly you're hodling for $200,000. Let's face it, even then you'd be waiting for $2,000,000…

Over the past five or six years, whenever I've gotten money, I've thought to myself, "I should put this into crypto," and mostly I have. I'm not a flashy person. I don't give a fuck about lambos or Teslas or any other car for that matter. I just want to do something with the little money I earn.

So when my portfolio jumps, I think, "I should sell a little and take profit!" … but then what do I do with the money? A week later, I put it into some new crypto. Something smaller, more volatile. Something that will make me feel smart when it goes up 200%.

And in this market, everything goes up 200%. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

The thing is, I got burned like everyone else in 2017 because I held to the top. I bought XRP on day 1 and turned $100 into $3,500. But I held all the way back down because I kept believing that "it's just a dip" stuff. (For a better discussion of this, see the post from yesterday about boiling frogs.)

It sucks selling out some of your crypto, especially when you don't need the money right now. It feels like a waste. This bull run, I've sold a little BTC at $17k, $23k, $28k, $37k, and $57k. It hurts a little to know that I sold any BTC at $17k but you know what? I don't regret it.

Yeah, it's now just fiat but the end of this bull run could come in 5 mins, 5 days, or 5 months. We don't know. No one knows. When it comes, though, I want to know that I've taken a little profit. Maybe I'll pay my rent for a few months… maybe I'll buy more crypto when the market inevitably tanks and we seem to have hint a new bottom some years from now. But along the way I'll take profit and do something with the fiat, and I recommend you do too.

Hope this post wasn't a bummer. It wasn't meant to be. I fucking love cryptos and I'll be hodling some of my favs for years and years to come, but if you view these as a financial investment of any sort, then you'll want to cash out a little here and there on the wild ride up.