112. Top 5 Investing Mistakes from Australia’s Largest Crypto Convention

I spoke to so many people who are splitting hairs over whether they didn't buy Ethereum at 1900 and now it's a 2100 and now that they don't want to buy or they're not sure whether getting in, they're waiting for a pullback. You're not going to think about these little blips on the radar in 3 or 4 or 5 years time when it's like potentially 10k plus, right? Who cares? It doesn't matter. You don't want to be out of the game when this train leaves the station.

The quote from Michael Saylor where he's like, when bitcoin is at $6 million, you're going to wish you bought at a million. I was like, oh, so bullish.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift, alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift, Australia's leading crypto portfolio insights company, providing professional analysis and portfolio strategies for crypto investors like you. We are a unique blend of the established and the self made and we're here to break down crypto business and personal growth. But we're not here just to talk crap. We're giving you the insights you need to make better investments, build successful businesses and level up your life. And today we're talking about the top five biggest investing mistakes we saw from the Australian Crypto Convention last week. We spoke to hundreds of investors, if not thousands I reckon Bergs over the two days. It was absolutely unbelievable. We had three massive presentations and we had a booth and we saw a lot of our current members, old members and new members and just the community came through. I felt like I just had a line around me for the, for the whole weekend I lost was by the end of it. But there was some really common experiences that we heard from a lot of these investors. That was really a unique insight that we were able to gain that we want to share with you some common themes about what we're seeing with most investors and those, you know, investing mistakes they're making.

Absolutely, mate. It was a cracking weekend. We even had a Collective Shift meetup which was so good. Everyone was coming up to the booth. Like I ended up losing my voice as well. People actually want to talk to me and I'm more in the background of the company. The analyst was slammed the entire time. We didn't have a spare second and we went to the conference with what we thought people actually wanted and what they were experiencing based on what our members want from us. All of our strategy calls, our one on ones. We get it. We're hearing this common message. We took it to the conference and it really resonated. And the people that came up to us, talked to us and told us their stories, we've summarized in these five points right here. These investing mistakes that people are still making that they need help with. And Ben, mate, we've just got to go through them now. Give all the Ben and Bergs listeners the beans and help them out, mate.

Yeah, so the first one was just, we, we just saw that not many were not enough people were going hard enough when the market was down. And this is pretty common, right? Maura Buffett. You know, it's a famous quote of be fearful when people are greedy and greedy when people are fearful. You really need to go hard when the market's down. And that's probably been over the last 12 months. You know, we've been harping on about buying bitcoin and crypto since, you know, bitcoin was at 16,000 just a little under a year ago. And that's where you're really going to get those undervalued assets. And if you've been accumulating in dollar cost averaging during those times, that's where you're able to really build up a great stack of crypto. So many people wait for the market to come back and now, you know, are on the fence about buying in which I still think it's a good time, but you've had like, you know, two years to really get into the market where there's been really undervalued assets. Now, as I said, I think that opportunity will still continue for the next few months. But you really need to make opportunity when those assets are down because that's where you're going to get, really get the growth. You want to be on the buy side when most people are selling and you want to be on the sell side when most people are buying. Right. That's really how you make money. You need to get in before everyone else and get out when most people are getting in. And we see that know in cycles in crypto, the retail investors come in right at the wrong time, right at the end. And the OGs and the whales have been here for a long time, been accumulating. They're the ones that make the money.

Exactly. And it was funny. I was trying to buy before the conference and I sent my money over to my exchange, waiting, waiting, waiting. The money got rejected because it had the wrong name on it. Because it's a new bank account and it's in joint names. Sent it back, had to send it to my other bank account, send it across. And I literally bought at the conference. I'm like, this is amazing, I have to get in. And the quote from Michael Sailor where he's like, when bitcoin is at $6 million, you're going to wish you bought at a million. I was like, oh, so bullish. And he just went on this huge, huge, beautiful talk about bitcoin, about crypto. And it was just, it was amazing. Like we forget we don't have this energy in our normal lives. You know, whether we are people in our friend groups, we, we're talking about crypto. When you meet up with like minded people, you see what's going on, what's happening in the macro environment with ETFs, what's happening with the economy. And people are going to come out of your bitcoin, going to come after your bitcoin. And sailors like don't sell your bitcoin. People are going to come after it. You can rent it back to them. Like it was just amazing. And we forget because there's no price action. And this is the time you should be buying in any market. Be greedy when others are fearful.

Yeah, and that's the leads into number two. We just saw, you know, dollar cost averaging at the wrong times again. It's just been taking advantage of those opportunities when those assets are down. And dollar cost averaging is just a great way. It's very basic. You've probably heard about as half on it forever. But you can just really automate your buyers. You set it up, you send a couple hundred bucks a week or whatever you can afford from your wage or your income and it's just going to keep buying and you got to forget about it. And you know, not a lot of people, you know, think about that way of investing or you know, how having savings anymore, like putting that money to the side, we wait to get a bonus or we wait for a big cash injection in our business or something like that. Where if you just, you know, if you're just on a salary or you just earn a bit of money, just put a little bit aside, you know, each week and you know, guess what, in a few months, in a year or two's time, that's going to really add up. So taking advantage of those lower prices and dollar cost averaging to build up.

That stack automation is the key. You need to do this for a Long period of time it needs to compound. Think about this. Imagine if you are hand washing all of your clothes every day with the bloody, you know, the old school, like stone and everything. No, you automated with a washing machine and it just gets done. You don't have to think about it. Your clothes are clean. Would you go out every day and water 100 square meters of your lawn or would you automate it with reticulation? You'd automate it. You don't have to think about it. It just gets watered and you don't have to think about it. That little bit of money comes out and it accumulates over time, whatever your investments may be and it builds your stack and you get on with your life and practice your craft. And dollar cost averaging at the wrong time. Ben, you and I, we watched a movie, Dumb Money. Amazing. Anyone out there in the crypto space, you have to see it. It's about deep effing value. Roaring Kitty, the guy from Reddit who bought GameStop against what stock. And it's amazing. It's got Pete Davidson, Seth Rogen, Vincent, forget his last name. Phenomenal movie. But they talk about all of these things in there when you're buying what other people aren't. And they go through the emotion, am I wrong? Am I going to lose my money? You know what's going to happen. But then they zoom out and they're like, no, the thesis is still the same. Bitcoin is actually gathering momentum. More and more is stacking up for Bitcoin to make sense every single day. And if you zoom out 10 years and 10 years in the future, would you want to be holding Bitcoin and cryptocurrency? The answer is absolutely yes. We've seen the data that comes out where it says add Bitcoin to any portfolio and its performance goes up. You know, these are the things you need to listen to and have that long term view and start dollar cost averaging.

And I spoke to so many people who are splitting hairs over whether, you know, they get they didn't buy Ethereum at 1900 and now it's a 2100. And now that they don't want to buy or they're not sure whether to get in, they're waiting for a pullback. You're not going to think about these little blips on the radar in 3 or 4 or 5 years time when it's like potentially 10k plus, right? Who cares? It doesn't matter. You don't want to be out of the game when this train leaves the station.

I am this person. So I'm like, oh, I was buying Ethereum at 80 bucks and that's two grand is too expensive. But the reality is if I think of returns on a risk adjusted basis, let's say I only get 15% from crypto per year, which is very low for crypto, where else am I going to get that return? Nowhere. If I get that, is it going to make sense for me? Yes, absolutely. And you said it to me, Ben, I'm like, I want to put X amount of money in. How do I put it in? Because I bounce my ideas off someone who knows what they're talking about. He said, mate, just tip all the money in because I ain't going to effing matter in 10 years time. And I was like, oh no, to put a little bit here, a little bit there and this is the first time where like I could have been buying like 28, 29 and I bought it like 37. Don't care. Like that kind of 8k difference is not going to matter at all when Bitcoin is 150 grand.

Totally. I remember, you know, seeing Vitalik in Sydney, right? ETH was $80 going down to 75. Doesn't make any difference really if you think about the long term, right? You got to sit now and go, you know, I, I, I didn't buy enough at 80 so I'm not going to not going to buy now. Like it makes sense.

We just did a podcast, if you're listening, with Anthony Susano. He's exactly the same. He bought eth like right at the start. He's got heaps of eighth. He's still buying eth at today's prices.

Yeah, doesn't matter. Keep buying number three. Going to degenerate into the wrong part of the cycle. What does that mean? Well, it means people trying to make money when there isn't really money to be made. And usually what happens is the reverse happens. You end up losing more money that you're trying to gain. People take on trading, people are like trying to earn a yield and doing all this crazy stuff, yield farming and flipping NFTs and all sorts of random stuff, but you're pushing shit uphill because you're against the macro cycle of the market. There's more sellers than buyers overall. So unless you can magically pull something out of the hat, most likely more than not, you're going to be losing money during that cycle. So.

What we recommend is just to hold BTC neath in those down cycles. Bitcoin outperforms 95% of all coins in a bear market. Hold it all the way down. And then as we start to come out into a ball again, you can start to rotate back into altcoins. But just, you know, ride the four year cycle, respect it, understand it. And you're going to be way better off if you're patient and just ride the way up.

Yeah. And you rotated a few months ago into a couple of altcoins. You see the returns there already. And just think about this. If you're going super D gen, you're into everything, you're signing heaps of contracts, it's up only just, just pause and go. All right, if that's my mentality, what's going on here? Things are getting a bit frothy. Maybe I should be on the other side of these trades.

That's what happened to one of our platinum members. Had a strategy call with him recently. He had about five or six hundred thousand dollars staked on all sorts of different old coins in a bear market and was down about 450,000 just over the course of a year and then sold at the bottom. And he didn't understand why. Well, it's like the reality is even if you stake coins and are earning 4, 5, 10%, the value of that old coin has gone down 80%. So it doesn't matter. So you know, what I did and what we try and teach is in a bear market is to hold Bitcoin and Ethereum and then get back into good times. And we're able to make some good entries. Back in July, a couple old coins. One's up more than 100%, the other one's up about 20 or 30% rather than. But that's only like off the lows. It's still down 80%, but your whole portfolio is not down 80% because you didn't buy the top and write it all the way down.

Yep, now's the time to rebalance totally.

Number four is no sell strategy. Now this is a good one because you still got time as we head into this next cycle. But this is the biggest key difference, I believe, to allow you to actually make money in a bull market. If you don't have a sell strategy, you're not gonna know when to sell, how to sell, why you wanna sell, and you just, you just won't. You write it all the way up and all the way down like most of you probably already have. So I highly recommend creating a sell strategy that can be as simple as just writing out your goals, writing out your price targets and how much you want to sell. There's a range of different ways you can sell your crypto in terms of different strategies. The way I do mine is just a dollar cost averaging out strategy. So finding a target you want to sell at and then selling a percentage of that target and still holding some. And I really like to be more earlier than later in a bull market just because of how quickly bull markets tend to end. So get that sell strategy in order, execute it and don't be emotional because as soon as you become emotional and you hope things go higher, you wish it will, you think it will. That's when things go to.

Absolutely. And this was the number one question that I had from people. Ben did a talk on it. It was packed, every seat was taken. There was probably about another 100 people standing out the back. This is what you talked about. We're actually going to do a podcast on it. But people do not know how to sell. So many people said, you know, I had a couple of moonbirds, I worth 58 each, you know, had all this crypto. I was worth 2.3 million on paper and I wanted to get to 3 million. So I wanted to buy a house. Didn't sell any of it. Now it's worth 100 grand. So many people came up to me with these stories and it resonated. And at the end of your talk, Ben, you had a link and we'll link this in the show Notes for everyone from Collector Shift how to create your sales Strategy. All like 300 or 400 phones went up and we saw this, reflected our website stats, got the little QR code and went and got that PDF. So we're going to provide that here, that PDF. We don't want your email, we don't want anything. So directly to a PDF to help you guys out.

Yeah, that it literally like 5x our website traffic in you know, space of like 20 minutes. We're looking at it after. It was really cool. So we'll link that below. So we basically the same strategy that I used to make the money I was able to make in the last cycle, we process that and now we have a 10 step strategic process that you can take yourself through. It's a PDF, it's got resources to help you create that sales strategy and all the other parts of it. And then as well we offer 15 minute complimentary strategy calls where we can actually walk you through that and help you create your strategy. So you can book that, just go to our website Collectives IO and You can put that in as well if you want.

Absolutely. And like, it kicks off with, like, defining your goals. And we've got resources. You click in the PDF, all the resources are free. You'll just go to a web link and it'll just, it'll show you how to think about it. And all our analysts have actually written the resources. And the first thing is, what are your goals? And like, I try to talk people through and they're just like, oh, like dead silence. Like, people haven't thought about it. They're just like, oh, number go up, stack more marbles in the bank. And so I tell them my goals of what they are like, you know, you know, getting a house, you know, another house, one for my daughter, taking a big family trip and then making some money so I can work part time for a while. And they're like, oh, that'd be really cool. And then they start really thinking and defining their goals and then tying their crypto to a number to be able to sell and then achieve those goals and increase their life fulfillment.

That's amazing. I was speaking to a guy that had over $10 million of Soul Solana, you know, pretty much got in really early, has never sold, wrote it all the way up and wrote it all the way down. I'm like, well, what are you trying to build towards? What are you trying to sell? Like, you know, what are you trying to get out of crypto? He's like, well, I don't know. Like, I don't know what I want to do. Like, well, that's the reason why you haven't seen money.

People have this idea of getting a massive capital sum, a number in their head, and they're like, then I'll be fine. I'm like, yeah, but, but what is that for? Like, you need to tie it to a thing and actually execute on it. Because if you're not taking profits, you're not winning, you're not being a proper investor.

Yeah, spot on. Which ties into the last one. Too many altcoins. This is a common one. We've been preaching on this for a long time. Why? Because I made the same mistake in my first cycle. Had way too many altcoins, 20 or 30. It's just impossible to stay on top of them all. And coming into a bull market, you need to be across these old coins. You need to know when to sell. You need to be, you know, looking at, are they achieving their roadmap, Are they ticking off the things they want to achieve, or are they failing? And you know, are the founders going a different direction and they're running out of money? Is the community falling behind? What is the token price doing? But too many altcoins are becoming can become impossible to track. So what I have done in the last two cycles is really consolidate. My altcoins have more high conviction plays and I can really follow the the evolution of those projects to ensure they go in the right direction.

Yep. What contracts have I signed? What are they doing on chain? What's their treasury doing? What's their voting system? What's going on in their discord? What bounties do they have? No, you can't do that. You can't be across 30 to 50 altcoins. That is absolutely mental.

Yeah, yeah, it's impossible. And I put that down. The core reason why I didn't make any money in the first cycle and I wrote it all up and all the way down is just because there's too much going on. So they're the top five. So to recap, not going hard enough when the market is down, dollar cost averaging at the wrong times going to degenerate into the wrong part of the cycle. No sell strategy and too many altcoins and we'll link to that strategy document in the show notes so you can get that, download that PDF, fill it out and make sure you execute it in this next cycle.

Well said mate. Like they were definitely the top takeaways. It was an amazing week and we heard this story over and over again. Hopefully this resonates with a lot of you that are listening now and take some time. Take a couple of hours on a Saturday. Do that sales strategy document. I did it and it is eye opening and life changing. I feel so much more comfortable. A stress has actually been lifted for me that I didn't know was there that was really bothering me.

Yeah. And you have a plan now you can execute and you know how it's going to play out and that's the best thing you can future project how this plays out rather than just going in blind. Absolutely amazing. If you haven't listened to our episode with Anthony Susano yet, we highly recommend you guys go check that out. It was absolutely amazing. It has been our most popular episode by far. Probably 5 or 6x higher than any other episode. So go and check that out. It's episode 111 creating wealth with Ethereum Ether Soul Eat Bull case. The top layer two is Anthony Susan. I checked it out was a cracker episode and if you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to share it and know someone that you think will find value, we'd love for you to share it with them. It's how we grow the podcast and come at you each and every week absolutely free in your ears. Thank you so much, Bergs. We'll see you next episode.

Thanks, champions.