I learned HODLING in both fun, but expensive ways...
Some of you who follow my blog have found recently that I like fishing a lot from some of my posts related to the topic. I fish from the shores of Danube almost daily with every cast being a complete surprise and every day absolutely unique.
Fishing "caught" me when I was 9 and ever since I almost every summer exercised this hobby. I can even say that it doesn't matter that much for me anymore if I catch anything or not. It's mostly about the adventure, the activity itself and the endorphins that flood my brain when I am near the water with my fishing gear.
It wasn't this way though throughout all my "fisherman" history, as I sometimes got pissed off about not catching anything and tried to understand why. When going after predator fish for example and see them jumping around you, but none of these damn jumpers bite your lure is really frustrating. After some time though, I realized that you have to reel your lure in front of it to bite and that "it" actually chooses you instead you choosing it.
Very often when you cast left it jumps eating right, or when you cast off shore it is near shore teasing you and so on. No matter what strategies you have and believe they'll work the thing is that you don't need a strategy. It's just about casting in the right place at the right time. Such example was the rapacious carp that I hooked yesterday in just a few seconds after the lure hit the water.
So, it doesn't matter if you cast 100 times in an hour. If your lure passes meters away from that fish or it's not interested at all of its shinnies you won't catch a damn thing. Made this analogy about crypto trading with fishing because I experienced the same situations when I first entered the crypto world as with chasing the "wrong fish".
My entry point in time to this world was in early December last year when the hype was big enough. Looking back at that time I can't say that it was a bad moment, but I can definitely say that I used really bad strategies. Being like a child in a candy store every coin that pumped for a while was the shinny thing that I missed and regret not putting my money on it. So I applied the greedy fishing casting strategy in here also that got me chasing continuously.
I was launching money left and right, but never had the patience to HODL until that coin has "its turn" in pumping to the ATH as it seemed they all had in a almost a month. I've done that with Ripple, Stellar, Lisk, Stratis, NXT and many others. So, after all these "casts" I ended loosing most of my money on NXT's hard fork that promised some valuable IGNIS tokens if you would hold NXT at the time of their hard fork(one IGNIS for two NXT coin). Not only that I bought it at almost ATH, but I sold it three time cheaper and the "baby coin" of it, IGNIS, was valued at 11 cents when I received it and not $2 as it was on pre-sales.
Bottom line I can say that know I know how to fish on cryptos, but unfortunately there's no fish around to bite for some months. I've put my money on some coins months ago and I am nothing jumping from one to another anymore. No matter how much mooning potential they seem to have. In the end almost all of them will increase in price and boom to new ATHs, but for me to cash out some profits the best strategy seems to patiently wait until my "hodled" coin comes in turn to be eaten by a whale.
There's a lesson to learn for every wide opened eye after all...and mine was to not chase jumpers anymore, neither on water and nhore on exchanges.