Subject: So About This Cryptocurrency Thing...

From The Desk of 
The Trader
Financial Freedom HQ


Greetings Friend:
Over the MLK holiday [U.S.] weekend, the New York Times published an article entitled “Everyone is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not.”

I can’t find any (though admittedly I didn’t look very hard), but that headline feels a lot like a carbon copy of some of the same madness that went for article headlines in the late 90’s and early 2000s as the internet boom reached its nadir (top).

I was relatively new to Wall Street at the time and it was a bit hard to wrap my head around the singularity of it all. Having been among the unborn at the time of the most recent mania preceding the internet craze, I, like most of those around me, had no idea that we were in the throes of a full fledged “Tulip” of our own.

The Times headline perfectly encapsulates what many people felt then and, more interestingly, what they feel now. There’s a huge desire to get on the wagon for ‘Fear of Missing Out’, or FOMO, that’s incredibly pervasive around cryptocurrency right now.

The stock market continues to make new all time high after new all time high, and most people feel like they either missed the run or don’t own nearly enough… especially since they could have bought the S&P 500 at around 666 at the bottom of the Great Recession in 2009 had they "only had the money"… and/or the "stones."  

Add to that the fact that just about everyone either knows, or has heard of someone, who’s made an absolute fortune in crypto in just the last couple of years or so, and you have a perfect recipe for FOMO and the resulting “oh what the hell, let me jump in now so I won’t be the only sucker missing out.” It plays right into a couple of the human race’s biggest frailties… Envy and greed.

Not a good way to create consistently profitable processes...
The article pokes fun at several Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) millionaires. It points out that it's a subculture dominated by free-spending millennial 20-somethings who act as if they’re the second coming of capitalism.

Again... 

The only difference now versus the internet insanity is instead of adding .com to skyrocket market caps [furniture, cars, and excite dot com], companies are changing their names to something that involves crypto currency and the like.

Not familiar with the current crypto craze? A few quotes from the article should give you a sense of how similar the current cryptocurrency madness is to the late 90s internet mania:

“Sometimes I think about what would happen to the future if a bomb went off at one of our meetings. . . [That] bomb would set back civilization for years.”

“[H]is main hobbies were reading 4chan and buying vintage pornography, passions that exposed him to cryptocurrency.”

“He said his holdings are into double-digit millions but wouldn’t give specifics other than to say he’d quit his job and is starting a hedge fund.”

“They talk about buying Lamborghinis, the single acceptable way to spend money in the Ethereum cryptocurrency community.”

“The [ethereum cryptocurrency’s] founder frequently appears in fan art as Jesus with a Lamborghini.”

“And he wears a solid gold Bitcoin “B” necklace encrusted with diamonds that he had made.”

“When I meet people in the normal world now, I get bored.”

“He pointed to his outfit — a long white fake mink coat, gold-heeled shoes — and said, “It’s gold, right? It’s gold.”


Does any of that sound familiar?

I know it personally because ANYTIME someone hears that I’m a trader, it becomes cryptocurrency convo time…

“Hey, do you own any Bitcoin?”

“What do you think about Bitcoin right here? Would you buy it?”

“When do you think people will start selling their coins?”


You get the idea...

Clearly the author of the Times article managed to make her subjects appear juvenile and narcissistic… and that’s a pretty big generalization.

Still, the perception is there-- it seems like EVERYONE ELSE is making a fortune in crypto… and you’re not.

Which brings me back to FOMO-- fear of missing out. Or more importantly, what I call “Fear of Missing Out… AGAIN.”

Everybody knows that Bitcoin and Ether went to the moon. And by God they’re not going to miss out on the next chance to jump on.

I started this post over the weekend... but today [17 January 2018] Bitcoin crashed even further through a more significant price level [$10,000].
What This All Means

With the perilous nature of parabolic moves higher in mind, perhaps the most troubling story from the article was that of a 56-year old janitor who cleans the seats at the local Cinemark movie theater.

She decided to dump her life’s savings into crypto, rationalizing her decision by saying “something is telling me I can trust this generation.”

Hmmmm...

Clearly that ‘something’ is her fear of missing out… again

Between her envy, greed and FOMO, she’s made a monumental financial decision driven by extremely powerful emotions.

Even some of the wealthy crypto speculators show signs of extreme FOMO.

As a community there seems to be intense peer pressure to NOT sell… to hold one’s crypto holdings until the price reaches some mythical height.

They should ask my friends who held a lot of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns stock and refused to sell what succumbing to that pressure can mean.

One young man who allegedly made hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto told the reporter, “All I know is the price of Ether is going to go up.”

That good old crystal ball yeah?

With such prodigious gains, the rational thing to do would be to take a good deal of money off the table and lock in some of those paper profits.  Any good process would require you to have done so already.

But, hey… FOMO says hold on. If the price goes up 10x from here, you'll miss out on those gains.

So, driven by some irrational belief that a market can be unidirectional and/or that they can predict the precise time to exit, they’re not selling.

That decision-making is as emotional as ‘something is telling me I can trust this generation.’

The lesson I want to highlight again is that emotional decisions tend to be bad decisions.

And these bad decisions often lead to painful outcomes that could have been easily avoided by having a good risk adjusted process in place.

Financial Freedom

I’m not suggesting to NOT buy crypto. Or that anyone should sell it for that matter.  I don't know enough about it nor do I watch it trade closely enough to have an informed opinion.

What I really wrote this tome for is to hopefully convince you to establish and follow a simple money making process for yourself: don’t gamble with your savings. You worked long and hard to earn it. Put a profitable process in place to protect and grow it.

If you understand the associated risks and have a plan to consistently extract profit adjusted for that risk, you're financially free.  

Let me say that again... If you have a consistently profitable for the risk being taken process in place, YOU ARE FINANCIALLY FREE.

It's not the lottery... you won't make the money all at once... but if you have a good process, you don't need to make it all at once... 

And, more importantly, once you get it started that profitable process can compound... And compounding is how you build wealth.

Hope it helps.
KIS,

The Trader

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