The Hive price is still low, and so are your spirits. You scroll through the same tired posts with the same tired comment:
Just wait for the next bullrun.
But here's the hard truth: the bullrun is not your plan. And if it is, then you don't actually have one.
I don't know if the 2025 bullrun is going to happen. Maybe Trump with his chaotic tariffs threw a wrench into the works, maybe Bitcoin is just too big to go up much at this point and the altcoins have taken on too much taint of rugs and cons, or maybe patterns just don't always repeat as we hope they will and expect them to. Whatever the case may be, stop waiting for the bullrun. You should in fact assume it's not coming.
The bear market is not the problem. It's the opportunity.
Warren Buffett, the man people love to quote but rarely emulate, once said:
The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table."
I know you readers probably get tired of me always quoting him, but he is the most successful investor in the world so like him or not, it behooves us to learn from him.
Buffett loves downturns. They give him the margin of safety he needs to deploy capital efficiently. He doesn’t wait for things to go up — he acts when prices go down. The rest of us could learn something from that.
Here’s the thing: If you’re not making money now, you probably won’t make much during the bull market either. Why? Because you’ll do what everyone else does — you’ll show up late, chase green candles, and exit too early or too late. That’s not a plan. That’s gambling.
You'll sit there, watch the peak, watch it start to go down. Think "of course it will recover, because this is the bullrun!" Then it doesn't recover. There's a famous phrase from Mike Tyson: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Same goes for investing. Everyone has a plan until they see their first giant red candle, then they panic and sell — the opposite of what they should be doing.
I put investing in quotes up there to distinguish it from speculating, a distinction Benjamin Graham — Buffett's teacher and mentor and one of the most successful investors before his student became the master — famously made, separating people who research and have a plan vs people who buy and hope for the best, often without researching, often just using the market as a casino.
A real plan does at least one of these things:
- Builds passive income (even if small)
- Grows your network or skills
- Accumulates undervalued assets
- Reinforces good habits for when the stakes are higher
If you're here on Hive just posting and hoping the price of HIVE goes up… you're not investing. You’re speculating. But if you’re building systems that reward you now — curating smartly, stacking dividend tokens, earning from engagement, creating evergreen content, or even just building influence — then you're doing it right.
Don’t envy those who made money in the last bullrun. Ask what they were doing before it started.
Look — I am right there with you hoping for a bullrun. I am still haunted by that 2017 STEEM bullrun where we reached $10+. There is nothing wrong with hoping for that. But we can't rely on it. We can't even expect it. We need to figure out how to make money now, not if the lottery hits.
Stop watching the charts. Stop waiting for the bull.
Make a plan that works at 25 cents HIVE. Make a plan that works at 10 cents. Make a plan that still works even if HIVE falls to the low that STEEM once did, which I think was around 7 cents. If that plan can't make you money when things are slow and uncertain, it won't hold up when the greed and hype take over either.
Bear markets are where the pros get rich.
Bull markets are where the amateurs get lucky.
[Note: I'm writing this on the 1st. I'm planning on scheduling it for sometime next week, maybe on Wednesday. As I write, Bitcoin is making a push to once again break through that 100k line. I don't think it will or if it does so, I think it will fall back down, but we shall see. As always, I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to see it just keep going up and up. The advice in this piece stands, however, even if we do actually finally launch into a bullrun. To sum it up: hope for the lottery win but make a plan that makes you money even if that lottery win never comes.]
