
It was just about the peak of the four year cycle when I first got into cryptocurrency. It was November of 2017 and whatever I was buying was pretty close to the top. I had a STEEM account, but my stake was so small and my followers so low that there wasn't much of anything I could do with it. Back then, I didn't even know about the four year cycle and I had zero clue that I would be waiting that long for things to get exciting again.
When November of 2021 rolled round, I was in a much better position as far as crypto is concerned, but I still didn't have the experience of living through the start and end of a four year peak. Needless to say, I played a lot of things wrong in 2021. I did a couple things right, but I spent most of my time waiting for tokens to hit a magical mark that they never quite got to. That meant the highs I could have taken some profit at were long gone by the time I realized I should have sold.
I knew it was going to be a long wait, but I vowed to do things differently the next time. Instead of having these hard and fast limits about where I was going to sell, I decided to create some soft targets where if such and such token reached that point, I would sell a portion of it.
I made a list in my Google Keep about what those targets would be. I stumbled across it yesterday, and it was quite bittersweet to see the hopes and dreams I had back then.

If you don't like being depressed, you might not want to continue reading this post. Then again, if you need a good laugh, this might be the right spot for you. I'm going to spend some time reviewing those soft caps and lamenting the fact that the four year cycle didn't play out the way we had hoped.
So October 2025 comes around which is statistically the peak of the next four year cycle, and wouldn't you know it, altcoins do absolutely nothing. With all the hype around ETFs, AI, and whatever else, alts just feel by the wayside, and all of my plans were a steaming pile of crap.
Besides the fact that alt-season never really showed up, I also failed to understand the fact that most altcoins seldom see a resurgence in the next cycle. Most people have moved along to newer shiner coins, so if they popped in the last cycle (whether you took advantage of it or not), they likely aren't going to do that again. Stupid me!
Back during the heyday, I was pretty heavily invested in the WAX blockchain. That meant something back then, it doesn't really mean as much now. I was pulling in a good stream of income from the Alien Worlds game which had a token of TLM. Unfortunately, I moved most all of those funds into Cub Finance, and I think most of us know how that ended.

The all time high of the TLM token was something like $.7397, but being conservative, I decided if it got to $.10 again then I would sell 40,000 of my tokens for a nice $4000 profit. Like I said though, that never happened and currently with a price of $.0001448, those 40,000 tokens are worth about $50. Since it was a soft cap, that 40,000 is really only about a 1/3 of my stack, but $150 doesn't feel much better than $50 at this point.
Like I said, I was heavily invested in WAX, but I kept waiting for it to hit $1. The all time high was $2.77, but I think that was shortly after it launched and once things settled down it never climbed back that high. It did get to something like $.98, but my bias of that $1 mark kept me from taking advantage. I decided not to let that happen again and set a target of selling 20,000 tokens if the price got back to $.25. Another $5000 to add to my bag, nice! However, we know that didn't happen, and at the current price of $.0057 those 20,000 tokens are worth about $100. Again, that's only a portion of my stack, but when you look at $100 compared to $5000, it kills.
I think this one bugs me the most. There was a point when WNCG hit a all time high of about $6, and there was also a point where I could have sold my whole stack for about $40,000, but I am an idiot and I didn't. I decided if it ever got back to $.25 I would sell it all and settle for the $2500. Sadly, with a current price of $.004, my 10,000 token stack is worth about $43.
CHEX is a token that is tied to Real World Assets and there was a time when those were expected to be the next big thing in crypto. With high hopes, I watched CHEX climb to $.80, but did absolutely nothing with my 10,000 tokens. I set my new target of $.50 and decided to sell 3000 tokens if it hit that point. Not a lot of money, but $1500 is $1500 right? Once again, I totally failed, and with a current price of $.015, my full stack is only worth about a tenth of what I hoped to get.
The final two tokens I set soft targets for were SPS and MATIC or POL. I planned to sell all of my liquid SPS if the price got back up to $.10 which would net me $1000. If you are on HIVE, you likely know that never happened and you can see my current SPS stake and value. As for POL, the plan was to sell 5000 of my tokens when the price climbed back to $2 per token. With an all time high of $2.92 and MATIC being a base layer gas token, $2 didn't seem too far fetched. Plus, it would net me a nice $10,000. As you can guess though, the migration to POL happened, and POL has never crossed higher than $1.29. With a current price of about $.10, my whole stack is maybe worth $500. It's really not even worth the taxes I would have to pay to convert it to fiat.
It's really quite depressing to see all your hopes and dreams never come to fruition. Take gains where you can, don't be a dummy like me. I'm slowly starting to learn from my mistakes!

I'm sorry about those missed opportunities. 🙁
It's hard trying to time the market. I'm not sure what others recommend but it might not be a bad idea to sell X % after a certain % increase or decrease.
!BBH
!PIZZA
!ALIVE
Yeah, that could be the key. Instead of looking at specific price points.
Dashed dreams aside, what a valuable post!
Really, @bozz, it’s a great story!
It speaks to the crypto bros, yeah, but it’s a well-crafted story for the rest of us, too.
Good luck going forward, @bozz.
May we all learn off your bad beats! 🃏
Thank you! Hindsight is definitely 20/20!
Nice memories walkthrough and I got into crypto similar to you in the spring or summer of 2017. I've built a mining rig with RX 480 and started mining Ethereum and got quite a bit of them, but didn't know to take profits at that point. Nor than, nor in 2021. Only the last cycle I've started to book profits and intend to do it also in this cycle. Taking profits is an addictive emotion, wish I discovered it earlier. 😎 😆
I really wish I had learned about it sooner and gotten into mining. I think things would be quite different for me now if I had.
I think what would have been helpful is not to look at an old token and think that in the new cycle it could reach the old time high, but look at the Market Cap and set your price based on the old time high of the Market Cap. With a lot more tokens in circulation four years later it is really hard to hit the same price target but Market Cap is a lot more realistic target which would inform the price you should try to sell at...
I don't really pay much attention to market cap. It's not something I really understand since I don't really do much with trading or any of that.
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Not that it's going to cheer you up, but most people think tokens are going to hit ATH, then set a new ATH and that's where they planning to sell. Most people are attached to round numbers, which hardly work as most of the times are frontrun. Not to mention most of the tokens never reach ATH.
The ideal thing to do is take profit gradually, then get out when htf turns bearish.
I'm sorry to read you've roundtripped so much unrealized profits but it happens.
This was the reason I had set those soft targets. Then I could sell like a 1/3 of my stack, wait to see if it went higher and sell another 1/3 and then just hold the other 1/3 to either rebuild or sell. If I could do it all over again there are so many things I would do differently. I really thought I might get a chance to fix it all this cycle, but then things never materialized.
If you like, I can help you with charting, teaching when an asset you've interest in turns bearish, to help you make some decisions. No one knows where price is going as this is a game of probability not certainty and whoever says they do, are liars, but still, charts don't lie.
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