When I was much younger I used to spend the entire day in the ocean on the occasional family trips to the beach. I'd be in the water for hours and hours; me and my trusty boogie-board. I was in the water so long that every time I got into bed at the end of the day it would feel like I was still in the water; bobbing up and down slightly.

How soothing.

My last boogie-board was so broken-in that the bottom of it no longer felt like smooth plastic, but instead felt more like extremely abrasive wood or some other material.

However, it's been over 10 years since I've lived in Ocean Beach (San Diego).

When you're out there in the water, looking for a good wave, you can see them from pretty far out. You have to judge where they are going to crash and position yourself accordingly.

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Sometimes a big wave will get snuffed out by the previous wave retreating back into the water.

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Sometimes two waves will combine into a much more powerful wave. As this double wave retreats back into the ocean all the waves behind it get muted.

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Sometimes a wave looks like it's going to be a large one from far out but then loses it's luster, and vice versa.

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If a riptide is pulling you out to sea, often times there is an opposite riptide on either side of you that will pull you back in.

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All of these random properties I learned while in the ocean apply to the crypto markets. I've begun to look at the markets in this wave form, and it is very very helpful.

I've made a lot of mistakes trading in the last two years. It's an easy thing to do when we've been in a bear market the whole time. However:

The market is dumb.

Pick any skill: guitar, poker, sports, swing-trading.
These are skills, and you can get better at them over time.
While you get better the general population stays at exactly the same skill level.

This is especially true with crypto. Look at how complicated it is. Look at how unknown it is to the world. We are the early adopters, and we can greatly leverage that advantage as every year ticks by. Over the coming years, everyone here today will have an insane home field advantage over the all the masses entering the space.

Dumb money

People say there will be no more dumb money pumped into the market. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is not the Dot Com bubble. Think about how much easier it is to invest in a stock than it is to invest in a crypto. Businesses have a plan. They have centralized leadership, overhead costs, physical locations, etc.

What does crypto have? Well, just look at Steem. Everyone thinks it's a blogging platform. It's not. The killer dapps of Steem aren't going to have anything to do with blogging/vlogging. The market combined with decentralized development decides where these projects are going. There is no way to tell which way the wind will blow in an environment that isn't being led through centralized control.

To think that dumb money isn't coming back is just that: dumb. We see it on every speculative pump and dump there is. Every fundamental event comes with a round of speculative pumping and dumping. Spoiler alert: you can never price things in early. There will always be a dump that comes before the fundamentals are actually realized. Show me one time where a speculative pump didn't dump and actually captured all those gains. It doesn't happen.

Opportunity only knocks all the time.

We are going to be given these investment opportunities over and over and over again. If we want to make money swing trading, we can't speculate on fundamentals. We have to speculate on the speculation of fundamentals. It's all a matter of timing.

Buy the Rumor, sell the news. Timing is key!

If a certain project has a big fundamental development coming out we have to assume that event is going to be priced in 1 to 3 months early. Often the market will peak 2-4 weeks before the event and then start dumping. Then it continues to dump even 2-4 weeks after the event and everyone gets discouraged.

You shouldn't be discouraged...

You should have anticipated the pump/dump.

After this happens, fundamental gains won't start to kick in until 6-12 months after the event (or more). Think about it this way, if SMTs were released tomorrow, how fundamentally bullish for Steem would that be in the moment? If your answer is anything above zero you've misjudged how software development works.

The day SMTs are released there will be zero SMTs. All the developers are going to have to figure out the tech, and then after they figure it out they actually have to build something good on top of it. This could easily take multiple years to accomplish. Yet the dumb greedy impatient market is going to try and price that in way in advance. It's so predictable it's almost embarrassing that I'm not a master at swing trading yet.

HAHA I got it used from the Navy!
You can flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds.

40 seconds!? But I want it now!

The market appears very random at times, but so is the ocean. They are also both very predictable. We know that waves are going to come in no matter what. We don't know exactly how they are going to combine and affect each other, but as we study the market in real time it gives us more and more information.

We can always count on the market to be impatient.
We can always count on the market to be greedy.
We can always count on the market to be dumb.
We can always count on the market to be desperate during bad times.
We can always count on the market to be euphoric during the run-up.

Trade Smart, Safe, and with Discipline.

Winter is coming.