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BTC took a nosedive, and most likely your altcoins suffered as well. A rough mix of FUD and bad news, along with a decrease in total market cap as Chinese New Year approaches, has caused that mess. By the way, it is not unusual for mid-January, and we've seen this quite a few times, so chances are pretty good we will see an immense run on the way up – it is even thinkable that we will see a run of Bitcoin together with altcoins. Now you hear them all: “Buy the f#cking dip!” they say. Ok – but how? When is a dip deep enough to buy? Or should I better sell off everything and move on?
A general word first
Table of Contents (click to expand)
You know the biggest mistake many people make when they enter the financial world? They see an asset rising and want to participate in the growth. That is okay, but most of them don't plan their entry; they just throw money at it. We remember the US people who took mortgages on their houses to buy Bitcoin while it was almost 20k. How must they feel about the current downfall? Sure, they will be scared, and it is totally normal to doubt that this praised new technology will rise in value again. They feel like they have caught the bubble's pinnacle and now just want to get out and get at least a fraction of their life savings or mortgage payments back.
The selling pressure must be enormous to those people. So, the first mistake is using money you don't actually have. If you do this, you won't have the needed balls to hold. The second mistake is the desperate attempt to get rich in the fast lane – this fails all the time, and there is no better approach to lead you into wrong investment decisions. The third mistake novice investors keep making, like a junky, is buying at the top and selling at the low.
It can only go up
And then it doesn't, and they just lose their sh#t and sell at the worst time. If you want to take part in those insane 2x, 3x, 4x gains in Crypto, you must be mentally able to handle volatility. If you can't, the money will do better parked in a savings account with 0.1% interest per annum. So one should better not panic when your altcoins and bitcoin are going down, and if emotionally affected, it's the best advice to close the charts and uninstall the portfolio tracker until it's over.
You are probably often reading “Buy the f#cking dip” (BTFD). As a trader, you always want to buy the low and sell the high – easy principle, right? Though there are some pitfalls to this approach, we want to give you some guidance on how to avoid catching a falling knife. So the question is: what should you buy in the dip, and when? You might see some coins that have fallen 20% in value, but is this a no-brainer to buy? Just because something has fallen hard doesn't mean it will recover along with the market when it does.
Here is what you should look for when you're trying to buy the dip:
Always be prepared
This is more general advice to be cautious when the market is going in the right direction. This is Crypto, and this is volatile – you have to be prepped. But what does that mean? Being prepared for a dip means keeping roughly 30% of your portfolio in BTC. If you invest 100% in altcoins, and the whole market plummets, you are stuck with 100% of your portfolio, and you are not able to average your ass out of this mess. Keeping 30% in BTC enables you to buy the f#cking dip, without the need of pushing new money into Crypto, which would increase your perceived stress – and stress is deadly in trading. So set aside 30% to buy the f#cking dip whenever everything dips.
Buy in staggered batches
Remember the following text: “No one knows how severe the dip will be once it starts. It can dip 5% or 20%. So, you prepared yourself for the dip, and there it is. You feel smart for taking care of this moment. Does that mean you should go now and invest that 30% in your favorite coin after a 5% value loss? No. Put your emotions aside, put on your cool sunglasses, and plan your entries. Take that 30% and spread it equally over the most promising projects you researched.
In this dip, we have chosen Stratis ($STRAT), Ethereum Classic ($ETC), Digibyte ($DGB), Adex ($ADX), Sia ($SC), and Stellar Lumens ($XML), for example. All of them have a lot in the pipeline and a solid outlook for the near future. But did we purchase them all at once right after the first dip? No! We spread 7% (keeping some small change of the 30% emergency funds in BTC) of our available funds in staggered buy orders along with the resistance points over these coins, which brings us to the next point.”
. Buy between resistance levels
If you are not familiar with the concepts of support and resistance and of trading without emotion, you should learn about them immediately. This is base knowledge, and you will need it to survive. Here is an example of the zone where we spread our buy orders on $DGB. If they don't get filled as the price rebounds, it's no big deal. We don't need to exploit every dip to the max.
. Don't buy the dips on coins that are already in a downtrend
We want to buy the super-fresh fish at a discount, not a smelly, dead tuna that points its toes if you hold it. You have to make sure the coin you are buying is in an uptrend if you want to BTFD it. Otherwise, the chance is very high that you catch a falling knife. After cutting your hands, it will fall down and stick to your leg for a long time. “Bad. Very bad,” how our beloved president would put it.
Examples of what not to buy:
– A Coin that had recently had big news and fell off hard after that, directly into the dip.
– Coins, where the intraday chart shows an ongoing appearance of lower highs and lower lows.
– Coins that have been moving within a downward slope (Bollinger bands) already for some time (intraday)
Check the overall development of the coin price, and make sure not to catch the end of a Wyckoff cycle.
This needs some experience in chart observation. The market moves in cycles. Roughly, you can say there is accumulation, breakout, distribution, and breakdown. You can read more about accumulation and distribution.
These five tips should have your back when buying this dip and future dips. Stay focused, and don't let your emotions eat you up or make you make bad decisions. You need a crystal clear plan to achieve success in Crypto trading – may these tips be a small part of it. If you feel lost on what to buy in this dip, we suggest taking a look at Digibyte, Adex, Stratis, Ethereum Classic, SIA, and Stellar Lumens and observing how they do (this is not investment advice). Most of them can be found on Binance.
