I'm old enough and yet still young enough to clearly remember a time when we didn't have the world at our fingertips. Many moons ago when I was in high school we had an assignment where we were supposed to pick some stocks that we would pretend to purchase and then follow.
For example, the Econ teacher gave each student a budget of $500. Back then that was a bit bigger of a deal than it is now. You could pick as many or as few stocks as you wanted, but you had to stay within your budget. Then each day you would track what your gains or losses were. We did this over the course of several months. I know, it wasn't really the long game, but it got us familiar with the concepts fairly early in life.
Here's the kicker though, we were always about a day behind because we couldn't check our stock prices until that night when we got home and looked at the newspaper.
Can you imagine that? Sure, the traders on Wallstreet always had a direct line to what was going on, but as for us plebeians, not a chance. Day trading might have been a thing, but you didn't hear about it nearly as much as you do today. It just wasn't as feasible.
I remember when I started working at my current job close to 20 years ago. My boss at the time wanted a stock ticker to show up all the time on his desktop computer. Stuff like that just wasn't available like it is today and I refused to put a ton of time into it because it wasn't really school related. He never pressed me on it, but it's just funny to think back about how stuff like that wasn't as commonplace as it is now.
It's been interesting to watch crypto over these past six years. It's been almost like the solar system with planets converging and diverging in terms of crypto and the stock markets.
It used to be the markets shut down at 5 PM EST every day. Sure, there was after market trading, but things didn't really heat up until 10 AM EST the next day when the markets opened back up. Crypto on the other hand was open 24/7.
Blink and you might miss something. Worse yet, try to get some sleep and you could lose the chance at six or seven figures. I can't tell you the number of times I've woken up to see that some token pumped overnight and by the time I get the chance to look it is back down where it was or even lower.
Time was definitely your enemy and if you didn't have the proper order set or a bot at your disposal, you were out of luck. Even today that is largely the case.
I remember several years ago when the crypto markets and the traditional markets were like polar opposites of each other. When one would go up, the other would go down, and vice versa. It was clean and easy, then somewhere along the line they found some synchronization and we watched them move together for a long time.
That's actually still a bit of the case today. We've seen some impressive gains in the stock market and here Bitcoin goes reaching for a new all time high. We know that a large factor in this price movement has to do with the ETFs and I wonder if we are going to eventually see a day when all these crazy 1AM pumps don't happen due to the markets being closed.
Or on the flip side of things, could the ETFs buck the trend of action only happening between 10 AM and 5 PM?
I don't think either of those is going to be the case, but we've honestly seen crazier things haven't we?
I think the key difference is the fact that there is still a 24/7 market for people who hold their own tokens.
The one thing I do know is that the more I learn about crypto, the more I realize just how much I really don't know. After six years in crypto, I still need a full time job. Meanwhile some douche named Chip can buy Doge on Robinhood at the right time and become a multimillionaire.
It's crazy, and infuriating, and so unpredictable, and it's happening all around us, 24/7.
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