Rather than giving in to the urge that many people are doing right now, and getting into a "sell to prevent loss" mindset, now i

Rather than giving in to the urge that many people are doing right now, and getting into a "sell to prevent loss" mindset, now is an even better time to buy than it was yesterday, and better than the day before that, and better than the day before that.

There are shills who say things right now with a tone of, "See?  Everything is down real far.  Some investment that is.  You'd be better off stay away from cryptocurrency," and they are doing what they can to justify their fear of trading.  They will never buy in and they will never experience the joy of multiplying their well-timed purchases.

There are people who are sore because they bought in when crypto was "up" and now it's "down" quite drastically from when they bought in.  It would be a sore place to be if you bought Bitcoin when it was trading at $65,000, to see your capital value today, if you believed that it was never going up in a reasonable amount of time.  This kind of mindset is considered under "FUD" or "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt," and this kind of thinking can cause some people to sell out completely at a heavy loss, and walk away regretful.

There are people who bought in only recently, when there was a short surge in value, and now they're suffering a smaller percentage of a loss, but there are plenty of people who are sharing in the same kind of FUD that the person who bought in a while ago may be.

For many people who find themselves selling for much less than they bought at, before they were a victim of this side of FUD, they were caught up in what's known as "FOMO," or, "Fear Of Missing Out," which caused them to buy in when a coin's value was on a steep increase, sometimes caused by a particularly popular single news article that causes a short-lived burst of trading demand which spikes the value for a few hours or days, before crashing low again, or perhaps their FOMO came back when Bitcoin was climbing up towards the $40s and the $60s and upwards towards $70k back in April and November of last year.  There are a lot of people who bought in when the prices were high, and they're sitting on a lot of capital that is "sore" for them to think about, because they feel like it's a loss right now.  It might be, but, it shouldn't be.

It is possible to trade your capital which is sitting in the red, and increase during the day-to-day fluctuations.  This is called day-trading, and it takes on more risk and tax and cost and mental liability, but it is an option for someone who is shrewd and has the time to monitor the charts and make spur of the moment and correctly-timed decisions regarding when to buy and when to sell to gain more crypto and to gain more dollars.  

There are several different mindsets when it comes to trading crypto, which I think a lot of people write about or talk about without spending much time thinking about what perspective they're talking from, or what perspective their audience is listening from.  In regard of cryptocurrencies, and as well when discussing traditional stocks on the NYSE or NASDAQ stock exchanges, there are several different mindsets that people can generally be classified as trading from, and I think it's essential to indicate what perspective you're talking from when discussing certain aspects of trading, such as trading strategy or reasoning behind market movements, and it's also essential for the shrewd trader to be aware of which perspective they are approaching each decision from, whether it's from a day-trading approach, or from a buy-and-hold-for-long-term-appreciation approach, or from an approach that's a mix of the two, or nuanced differently, like when bots are trading, or when trading based on information or other means outside of market watching.

Specifically to general market-watching trading, to avoid FOMO and FUD, it is a most important thing to be aware of your trading strategies and whether the approach you're taking is working or not, and to be able to observe and adjust as necessary. Are you buying X amount of Coin Such-n-Such because you believe its value will increase in the next 5 minutes, or because you think that it's going to increase by the time you get out of the game next year? Are you selling because you're noticing a pattern that indicates the value is about to take a sudden drop, and you want to buy the dip, or are you selling because you've been holding this coin for three years and you've just decided to take out half of that capital to enjoy it for today, while you let the rest of it marinate?

There are many different ways to look at your own belongings. How you decide to trade is entirely up to you, and there is no official or foolproof way to follow that will guarantee that you're going to make all the right trades and end up a millionaire or billionaire. Rather than blindly trading crypto just because you can, and just because someone got you into it, it's really important to think about the perspective you have about all of this, and what you believe, and it is important to weigh whether the time you're going to invest into crypto is worth the overall outcome at the other end of it. For some people, none of this stuff matters, and they stopped reading once they saw that this post is longer than 140 characters. For people who are here because they want to be on the right side of this next wave, my encouragement to you is to get to a mental point of view where you are comfortable because you have started from the basic thoughts you have about crypto, and you've thought through your plans, and you are following your plans and watching them unfold positively.

Much of this trading game is regarding our point of view. Some people are of the mindset which causes them to say things like, "perspective is reality," and in some regards, there is an extent to which this concept is true, but in general, there is only one reality, and each of our individual realities are subject to that overall objective reality. In most everything in life, what each of us would call "reality" is a combination of what is actually real, and what only our mind sees as real. Sometimes our mind alone sees reality and the whole rest of the world misses it. In most situations, though, our own individual perspectives are too short-sighted to be able to be reliably called "full reality," but, for someone who begins with truth, who remains in the truth, who never leaves the truth, and who ends in the truth, that person can reasonably and honestly say, "I know what reality is" because that person's reality is true, and what is true to them is actually reality, because they have not a lie in their sight or their mouth. This kind of life is impossible without Jesus Christ.

We all ought to pray and yearn and believe and behave in such a way so that we are rewarded by the fruit of living in reality. One such way is to make good decisions with your resources. This begins by realizing that everything we are given was first given to us by God. It belongs to Him from before it existed, it belongs to Him now, and it will belong to Him long after we are finished borrowing and using it. When we realize that nothing we have actually belongs to us, but is actually God's, it frees us in a way which is like growing up and realizing that your Heavenly Father is more wealthy than every rich person who has ever lived and He not only invites us to pray to Him and to tell Him what we need, but as His children, He invites us to reach into His storehouses and bless others with what He has blessed us with. Before you can understand any of this, though, I think it is imperative that you tithe according to your conviction. The Bible tells us to tithe. My testimony is that the discipline of tithing has helped me learn spiritual disciplines that are way more valuable than dollars and cents. God does not need our money. God wants us to realize our heart's condition, and once He does a work in our hearts, we cannot help but be grateful, and our tithes are our heart's response to wanting to give back to God for all the good things He has done for us. Tithes are not purchasing anything from God, nor are they gaining His favor. The Bible teaches us in the New Testament that we are not to give out of compulsion, or because somebody made us to, but out of a heart of thanksgiving. I am telling you to being here with tithing, because if I were to guess, I think I would guess that most people reading these posts is not currently tithing, and this indicates that your life is not currently in a posture which is living grateful to God. This can change today, while it is yet today, if today is the day your heart surrenders to your need for Jesus Christ.

Should you be already faithful with your tithes, then you probably are also faithful with your financial responsibilities as well. I'm writing to you in this post specifically about a comfortable point of view to have in trading, and a lot of this begins with your foundation. If you are not beginning on a solid foundation, then the rest of what you put your efforts into is going to be as reliable as a house of cards on a windy day. If you do begin on a solid foundation, then you can build and learn and have the freedom to make some mistakes as you learn, while you get better and more confident that your money is making money for you. If you spend the next year of your life stressed out and consumed by the charts of what Bitcoin and your chosen "altcoins" are doing, then you're playing this game wrong, in my opinion. I'm sharing these words now in an effort to give you a better way to approach this trading, so that your stress levels can remain minimal, in trading of course, and perhaps these principles could transfer to other areas where you might struggle with fear or doubt.

In the life of a believer, there is no room for fear, because we have first feared God, and when He met us, He showed us not to fear. Having this as our foundation is ultimately the most important foundation to have. For someone who does not believe that they will have eternal glorious life with Jesus Christ after this life, I'm actually not sure how they get out of bed every day, with life how it is, and I think that a lof you y'all reading this here are that "they" I'm talking about, people who are not walking with the Lord for one reason or another. I believe everything happens for a reason, and I believe God led me to write His grace and truth into everything I write, and I believe that He helps me pray and He helps me minister to people when I don't even realize it sometimes, Whatever blessing you can find in these words, share it with someon else and enjoy it yourself!

If you do not believe in Jesus Christ, that's more important than everything else I've said, and it's important to take care of that straight away, before this world ends and everything in it burns up. I believe this is a likely possibility as more and more each day it shows that we are living in the last days that this Earth will exist, and the Bible has described dark days ahead. For years, people were able to "get saved" under non-urgent circumstances in our country, but today, I would be lying if I were to try to calm you and pretend like everything is just going like it always has. Things are not normal, they're not going to ever "go back to normal," and they're really only going to get worse. Anybody who tells you otherwise is not living in light of what the Bible says. God says it's going to get so bad that He is going to cut the days short, otherwise no flesh would survive. This is the end result of sin. It's what's called death. This planet is dying. It is becoming a molten lake of fire. Jesus Christ saves and He stands at the door and knocks and He says that if any man hears His voice and opens unto Him, He will come in.

If you're not sure where to begin, you simply need to go to a quiet place and be alone, or sit right where you are right now, and focus your mind on the One True God, the name Jesus Chrst, and invite Him to live in you, and He will. His Holy Spirit will be your Comforter and Companion and He will be the One Who convicts you of your sin and causes you to want to confess your sins and get totally straight with God. The Holy Spirit will do all of the work, if you are willing to surrender your heart and let Him. In fact, you cannot do the work required, only God can cleanse you, and only the blood of Jesus Christ could make you clean. It's a lifelong journey, and the best part of this journey begins as you believe in Jesus Christ. From there on out, we have total access to peace, and we lose all reason to have worry or fear.

With cryptocurrencies, by contrast, there is always a real and present and perhaps imminent threat that all of our investment and hard work and careful attention will come to nothing profitable, and that one day it will all crash and we will lose access to our money, and so there is a certain real and intense level of stress that comes from investing any amount of valuable money into purchasing cryptocurrency, and although I'm not going to claim to be able to grant you peace, I can tell you how I have come to become peaceful and comfortable with how I trade, and if anything from my approach helps you, then so be it.

One lingering thing that I'm not sure I'll ever really resolve is the thought about how a whole lot of people have to lose, for me to win. It's a given in any money exchange, and it's a given in any casino; albeit, in a casino, the house always wins, whereas in trading cryptocurrencies, a shrewd trader will not be gambling, but will be earning a profit with confidence because every decision they make will be profitable. I do not consider trading cryptocurrencies to be gambling, because I trade in a way which allows me to win, and I assume that everyone who puts their money in would have put their money in anyway whether I do or not, so I don't feel bad for taking the money that they funded the system with, because that's how it works, and they were fine with putting it in to begin with. This being said, it still irks me to think about the fact that I'm openly telling people here and throughout my journey that cryptocurrencies are going to eventually crash, and that most people know this on some level, and I tell people that the "Moonshots" are the results of lots of silly people buying in while lots of prudent and patient people are selling out, and all those silly people will shortly be left with a seriously depreciated asset, once the Moonshot is over and the markets come back down closer to "baseline," wherever that may be trending recently. It irks me because I'm counting on the stupidity of others, and I'm counting on being able to time it just right so that I'm selling my capital at just the moment they're thinking Bitcoin is worth $450,000 or so, if that's where I think it's about where it's going to peak during the next Moonshot (which is my best guess at the moment).

So, while my best guess is just a guess, and cannot be relied on as anything more than a guess, I'm going forward with my crypto investment with the basic belief that crypto values are going to continue to increase over the long-term, with intermittent down-slopes, and the infrequent significant spikes in value. I do not believe that crypto will ever dip down below the $5000 value again, until its last days perhaps, when it finally crashes. I think it will remain considerably higher than $5k, but it's possible that it could have brief dips that low, during the next stage of massive volatility. I believe that the later the Moonshot happens, the more significant these swings in value will be during the initial season of volatility as the next Moonshot gets underway. If the next Moonshot happens in the near future, then perhaps we won't see Bitcoin's value dip so low, but if the values keep dwindling for perhaps the next 8-12 months before the next Moonshot takes off, then the volatility will be astronomical.

Beginning with this basic principle, which is that the values will always increase, I build all of my other trading strategies for crypto from there. Of course I understand that the values go up and down. I'm not blindly ignoring the reality of value fluctuations from day to day and month to month. I'm simply stating my belief that over the longer-term periods, the value of cryptocurrency is a definite "up and up" proposition, versus the traditional NYSE or NASDAQ stock markets. The stocks are ownership tickets in a company, and they can completely crash. Cryptocurrencies are more tied to the value fluctuations of stocks as the money pools are shared, during lulls in trading volume, but as the crypto markets wake up, we see that cryptocurrencies are on an only-up trajectory. There is no room for depreciation in the value of Bitcoin. These cryptos are programmed to increase in price. I have written more exhaustively about this in another post here.

Believing that cryptos are going up over time, I approach trading from two main perspectives, one being as a day-trader, and one being as a longer-term prospector. As a day-trader, I am sometimes trading the same crypto multiple times in one day, as the price fluctuates. DOGE and SHIB are where it's at. As a longer-term prospector, I hold DOGE, SHIB, and some other coin, believing that during the next Moonshot, they're mostly all going up as the value of Bitcoin rises to its next record high, whatever it may be. I'm looking at somewhere between $160k - $1.2m, which would bring the altcoin world up quite a bit. Having tens of thousands or millions of some tiny coin today could considerably change someone's financial standing by seeing it materialize into lots of dollar at the middle of next year.

Sometimes, I take all my long-term holdings out and trade or sell them, as I anticipate the market is going to suddenly have a severe dip. Then once it settles at some low point, I'll put those longer-term funds back in, with a bunch more crypto coins to show for it than what I had before. Aside from these rare times, the long-term savings just sits there through the day to day fluctuations of the markets, like a savings account.

As for the day-trading capital, sometimes I leave it in longer than it's out, and sometimes it's out for more hours during a day than in. It depends on how much attention I can put towards it, and what I believe the near-term markets might do.

All of my cryptocurrency was purchased with money that I earned. Of course I want to see it work a profit for me, but, with all my high expectations and hopes for rewards, there is the stern caveat regarding the very real possibility of losing it all in an instant without warning. It could happen before you get to the end of this paragraph, the whole internet could crash, or just your favorite blockchains or exchanges, and poof! There goes the money, gone in an instant! I don't wish this on anyone, but it's a given. I can more than a dozen different reasons why this is true, and a lot more people aside from me also acknowledge this sentiment and knowledge of the inevitable collapse of cryptocurrencies. To trade comfortably, there are a few considerations that I recommed in regard of the money that you use.

You should use money that is not necessary money for anything else, and it should be your own money. This money should be money that wouldn't hurt too much if it were lost, and I recommend working to double or triple your initial seed money, and then take that original money back out once you've multiplied it sufficiently. If you do this, then you can have the perspective that no matter what happens to the crypto funds you now have, you're never actually losing any real money. Since you're operating with only profit at that point, even if you were to lose it all, you've only lost profit, and the time and energy you've invested in it. If you keep your original seed money in, and lose that as well, then mentally you can believe, "I've lost it all," and that hurts more than, "Oh I was just playing around with profit and I lost it all."

It's important to study and understand the technology. If you are a computer geek, then researching cryptocurrencies and blockchains and POW vs POS and all the related terms will be easier than if you're a soccer mom with barely any time for studying. Either way, study. If you don't have enough time to study the technology, then it is probably not a great place to invest your money in, because it requires vigilance and an understanding of what's going on, to be able to know when it's safe to have your money in or out. Even for long-term holders who just believe it's always going up, it is entirely possible for any related or unrelated event to have an unexpected impact on the cryptospheres, and cause it all to go away. It is very good to have a grasp on how it all fits together so that you can recognize the signs of impending doom as it happened recently at FTX for me. I got out before any detriment to my account, but not everyone is saying this.

Aside from that, it's also good to study and understand the specific technology that you are choosing to trust your money to. What tech stack does the exchange you trade at run on? Have they been hacked before? How often? How did they handle it? How does the blockchain work that your favorite coin runs on? Is it on a layer 1 or deeper blockchain? What value-added features and community support does your favorite coin hold? How many eccentric rich people tweet about your coin? There are a lot of dynamics to be aware of when researching, and a crypto news aggregator site like cryptopanic.com is a good place to get a variety of news.

There is too much news to consume. Often, just reading headlines is enough to get an idea of overall current market sentiment, which is often times all you need to know to make some trading decisions, like whether to leave my crypto in overnight or take it out while I sleep.

Once you've figured out which coins you want to trade, and where you're trading them, if you do decide to store them long-term without trading them, you need a cold storage solution. You can create a paper wallet (without a QR code, just a simple piece of paper with your two keys written on it), or you can use a hardware wallet interface. I use the KeepKey, but there are much more robust ones out there. It is imperative that you use a hardware wallet for your primary assets when they're not being actively traded. You don't want to wake up and find out that you just happen to be the next victim of the latest exchange to go under. A hardware wallet with a security phrase and a totally disconnected interface is the best way to keep your crypto safe while you're saving it as crypto.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned a few approaches or mindsets that people can face when trading, regarding some discouraging situations and ways to think about things. If you're someone who bought in when the prices were high, and now you're looking at your value sitting at a significantly lower value, consider (continuing?) day trading, so that at least while it's at this lower value, you can still be maximizing the use of it being in the markets, and you can continue to add to your capital.

Whether you decide to let your capital just sit, or whether you day trade, you could become victim to the "I'm doing everything opposite of what i should" mindset, where it seems like you make several bad choices in a row, so you buy high, then you sell it low, only to watch it rise in value right after you sell it, and then you don't want to lose what little profit you might be able to make, so you buy back in again while it's shooting up, but then right after you buy back in, it drops back down again, and so now you've compounded your losses. I think a lot of us go through something like this at least a few times in our trading learning processes, and even into our later stages, because of our human nature to fall into the FOMO/FUD trap.

Instead of selling right now, while the markets are down, it's better to see today's prices as even more of a reason to buy more crypto than when I bought crypto last time. If I want to buy DOGE when it cost $0.140 per DOGE, and now it's trading at $0.095, it's a much better buy right now, especially since I firmly believe that overall the markets will go higher than they have been before, so if I wait long enough, it will eventually be a gain. This is a better way to look at it, than to look at the markets going lower, and thinking that it's time to get out of crypto altogether, so it's time to cut losses and sell everything and just take what money is available and go. This is a defeated mentality, and I'm sad to say that a lot of people are writing articles from a very defeated mentality, and these people are just miserable and will be even more miserable when they are kicking their selves for not buying tens of thousands of DOGE and tens of millions of SHIB when they could for pennies and pences.

A lot of people are into crypto because it's what a lot of people are doing. These people are all losing their money together. It's the people who are looking at what's happening in crypto and who are able to make independent choices which are independent of what the group is doing, these are the profitable ones making their money work for them in crypto. Anybody who is stressed about it all is looking at things very differently than what I've described here. Simply just being unaware that these coins are programmed to become more expensive is a major blindspot that a lot of supposedly "seasoned" traders have, when they talk about the values being intrinsically tied to market capital. Too many people are looking at cryptocurrencies like stock markets, and although there are many similarities and there is a profound tug-and-pull relationship between the values of the markets, they simply are very different entities from each other, and anybody who approaches cryptocurrencies with the same exact mentalities that work in the stock markets is only going to be frustrated if they refuse to observe and adjust their approach and realize that cryptos are different than stocks.

Perhaps you only learn one thing each week by reading news about cryptocurrencies. That one new thing you learn is another piece of information that you can use to build a more confident view of how things work in the crypto world. When it comes down to it, the best teacher is experience, and you really can't learn any better way than diving in and buying and selling and paying attention to the charts and movements of the markets.

If you begin with some solid core beliefs, then you can uncover some solid principles to follow which ought to be reliable in most situations. The longer you stay in the game, the more experience you'll get in various situations, and eventually your principles will become patterns of profitable success. The alternatives to trading with confidence are many, and there are perhaps people who thrive by inducing immense amounts of stress into their mental activity, but I have learned that I operate best when I'm not super stressed, and over some years, I have become comfortabl trading by becoming comfortable with the risk and by developing a steady strategy based on a combined short-term and a long-term approach. Simply having a gameplan is half of the work. The other half is following it.

There is a danger for some people to perhaps become over-confident in their plans, and this can be damaging, because if you're not willing to admit that you need to correct or adjust, then you'll be blind to those times when you do need to, and you'll make decisions which will be mistakes later. Instead of this, it's good to always be able to be ready to adjust as necessary. Acknowledging to yourself that you are learning can help to have patience with yourself. Sometimes, we learn the same lessons over and over again until we grow in wisdom, and sometimes that wisdom comes from making mistakes which cause us to realize how to avoid making those mistakes. This happens in trading cryptocurrency, for people who learn, and so it's good to start out small, and work your way up.

Beginning with just $250, I'm aiming to add 3% to my capital every day, in less than a year I will be a multi-millionaire. 3% is not difficult to add. It takes an incredible amount of attention to work on this daily, but, I am paying that much attention, and I am finding that most days there is ample opportunity to earn 3%, and it's a good guideline to follow for keeping a long-term perspective of trading. I don't want to just be trading to be trading. I'm in the game to make some money and to be able to enjoy the use of that money. While I'm trading, I'm also hoping to be able to continuously break off chunks of money here and there to use and spend as I choose. Eventually, I want to get out of the markets altogether and have enough money to not have to think about money.

One of the keys to being able to have peace internally while trading cryptocurrencies is to be able to put it aside and not think about it while I'm thinking about something else, or while I'm spending time with others, or while I'm working. This was a more elusive peace for me, for a long while, because I was easily consumed with thinking about it almost every waking moment, for what seems like years. It just took time for me to adjust and realize that I was spending an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking about cryptocurrencies. Eventually, my mindset shifted from it being a constant nagging thought incessantly begging me to check my balances, to it being more like revisiting an old thought I set down a while ago, only to set it down again after checking in and seeing how things are doing.

When weighing the risks/reward ratio of trading in cryptocurrencies, stress is often a weight that many people willfully overlook as they size up their ability to trade profitably, but until you work through some of the routines associated with the ups and downs and roundabouts of cryptocurrency trading, there simply is no real way to prepare to handle it other than to go through the thought processes involved with seeing your capital values fluctuate as a result of your actions or inactions, and the more capital and the faster it fluctuates, the more intense the feelings associated with it. I don't like to stress over anything in life, and early on I realized I needed to be intentional about managing my thoughts and time regarding cryptocurrencies, otherwise I would get stressed. Now that I've develoeped a relatively stress-free and very comfortable perspective to trade from, I can honestly view trading cryptocurrencies as a game, one in which preparation and prudence makes for a sweet reward.