"It's just astounding to me how willing people are during a bull market just to toss money around because they think it's easy."
—Warren Buffett
"I can't tell you how to get rich quickly. I can tell you how to get poor quickly: by trying to get rich quickly."
—André Kostolany
There's something about a green chart that messes with your head. Logic slips. Risk tolerance inflates. Suddenly every token feels like a lottery ticket with better odds. We get dollar signs in our eyes and feel like we just can't lose. As Buffett says, we think it's so easy--how can we not get rich?! Just buy, and it will always go up! …right?
I've been thinking about those two quotes a lot lately. Buffett's words sting a little—because I have tossed money around before. Sometimes I got lucky. Unfortunately, my luck didn't come early enough to make me one of the Bitcoin millionaires, but I've had some wins. Other times, well… let's just say I've learned to appreciate the value of caution.
André Kostolany's line, though? That one hits even deeper. The idea that trying to get rich quickly is a straight path to getting poor quickly—that's a truth I've had to learn the hard way. There's a reason the crypto graveyard is full of coins that once "couldn't possibly fail." There's a reason the term rekt exists.
I'm not the only one realizing this. I fully believe one of the reasons all alts have been falling against BTC is because people have started waking up to the fact that 99.99% of them are scams.
But this post isn't just about being cautious. It's about trying to build something sustainable—slowly, deliberately—even if that means it's not very exciting. It means taking profits without regret, resisting the FOMO pull of every new moonshot, and doing boring things like reinvesting dividends, tracking my cost basis, and holding when it's better to hold.
Warren Buffett is the master of that. He always advises that if you aren't comfortable not knowing the price, you shouldn't buy it—and when you do buy a company (he always speaks of buying companies, never stocks), you should hold it long-term. His partner Charlie, as usual, was more candid: he called day-trading stupid and a good way to lose money (it was probably much stronger than that; Charlie was not known for mincing words, after all).
Regular readers know I've been dipping my toes back into the stock market for this reason. Compared to crypto, the stock market is pretty boring—but that's the point.
I've been thinking about this not just as a strategy, but as a mindset. A kind of anti-hype discipline. The idea is to follow more of a Warren Buffett approach: avoid overtrading, take time to research not only every project I buy but each person behind it, and consider my full strategy for any token or coin before I buy it.
I'd recommend this to all of you. I'd also very much recommend reading Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, which Buffett and many others consider the greatest investing book ever written. It's gone through several editions and is still in print. It's about the things I mention above—not about charts and short-term trading strategy. It's a long book, but buy it and nibble at it every now and then.
Maybe this mood was brought about because the bull cycle due this year hasn't come (yet?), and seemingly the pattern has been broken. We could blame Trump for this with all his chaos, but it was bound to happen sooner or later anyway, so it might as well be now.
As I always tell @raymondspeaks, if the bull market actually does come, we'll be happy and take full advantage, but we should start behaving as if it isn't coming, and learn to love the bear.
That leads me to another Buffett quote. I don't have the exact wording in front of me, but it basically boils down to: I hate bull markets and I love bear markets: that's when the real money is made.
It's a strange kind of optimism, I guess. Not the fireworks kind. More like a slow sunrise.
And maybe, for me, that's good enough.
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. |