179. I Got This Crypto Investment Wrong, Here’s What I Learnt

If you're holding shit, shit won't turn into good. There's nothing worse than hearing some bloke or chick online telling you how easy it is to make money because it is absolutely nonsense.

Whenever you meet someone that has money, the first question people will ask them is, how did you make your money? The question you want to ask them.

Is how did you almost lose a ball?

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 Ms. Burgs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scanning a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. And if you like the podcast, we'd love for you to share it with a friend. It's how we bring the podcast to you each and every week, completely free. No advertisements, no affiliates, no commissions, no nonsense giving you the beans so you can win in crypto. And today we are debunking two investments I made a year ago. One was a really great investment and one did not play out as I expected. So we're going to go into detail the wins and the losses. And ultimately this I think berg sets us apart from other folks online where if you look on anyone, no one gets anything wrong to their BS, they're always right. 10 out of 10, everyone's making money. What a load of Horeshit. You do not go 10 from 10. 100% in investing and the lessons come from the losses. So today I want to go into detail of two investments I made in July last year. One being Maple Maple Finance, which I'm still a big Investor in, up 165% since last year and it ultimately got close to 3 or 400% in the March peak, but as of time recording 165%. And Polygon Matic, which I invested in, which was down 40%, which I recently sold. So we're going to go into detail, Bergs. But isn't it funny? But you go online, mate, everyone's great, everyone's perfect. No one makes mistakes. What a lot of crap.

You only hear about the wins, right? And it's like people that are gamblers, you only hear about their trading wins or horse wins or stock market wins. It's like, no, show me your P L. What have you actually done? When will someone admit that they got it wrong, that you can't choose all of them right? All the time, that's not the game. You choose the ones with the highest chance. Sometimes they don't work out and you readjust.

Yeah, spot on. So when we're going to go into detail, I'm going to share with you how I came up with these investments. Two years ago, I actually shared these with our Collective Shift members. So that's one of the benefits you get as a member. I share with you, my investments live and when I sell. And this is something that has happened over the last 12 months. So Maple continues to be one of my biggest Altcoin holdings has been a standout investment for me. It's a defi project with really strong fundamentals. It offers institutional borrowing and access to capital through defi lenders. Basically, the platform has performed extremely well, continue to grow, new products, new, new services. And I believe it has, you know, still a lot to come. So I invested in Maple at about $5.50 in July last year. It peaked at about $30 in March. So it did about a 4X, which was great. Now pulled back with a recent correction at about $15, so it's up about 165% now. At the same time, I also invested into Polygon Matic, so a layer two on Ethereum. I felt like at the time Polygon was a super solid play. So the reason I invested in it was I saw strong fundamentals, I saw great adoption metrics, plus they had a lot of high value B2B deals that they profiled such as Disney, Starbucks, DraftKings. And I also thought that the Polygon 2.0 upgrade as they move from Matic to poll migration would be enough of a driver to grow the network.

The other thing as well is I like that nearly 100% of Matic's token supply was already in circulation, so there was less sell pressure to come in contrast to other projects. And I just thought there was going to be a solid, you know, chance of demand as Ethereum would grow, Matic would grow as, you know, more and more, you know, users come on the chain. Now, clearly this didn't play out. The above factors really didn't, you know, play out. As I thought, while the metrics themselves on Polygons are holding up okay, there is absolutely zero momentum. So it's been completely crushed. One being that basically all of Those high profile B2B deals came undone in the last year. And another thing is just that Polygon 2.0 took so long to come out, it's only recently came out as a phased release and could continue going on for months to come. Also that the layer 2 ecosystem has been very confusing for the average user. There are so many layer twos around and the sentiment around layer 2 tokens are extremely poor, including Polygon. So Polygon is now down 40, Ethereum is only. I think Ethereum is probably down 4 or 5% over the last, you know, I think year to date. So Ethereum hasn't performed, which mean Layer two is. I kind of performed. And given the circumstances, I've decided to sell Polygon out of my position.

Disappointing that it didn't play out the way I thought it was going to. But I think the biggest learning lesson here, Bergs, is that we need to continue to reassess and adjust our investments based on where the market is at, the dynamics, where the space is going, and ultimately Polygon could turn around. There's a high chance that things will turn around and they go well, but the risk to reward ratio at this point, in my opinion is just not where it's at and that capital can be better used elsewhere. And specifically I put that into Bitcoin. So, yeah, that's a bit of the overview, Bergs. But hopefully, you know, this gives some insight to others that cutting your ties, cutting your losses, understanding that you've made an investment that hasn't gone your way doesn't mean it was a bad investment at the time. It just means that the thesis hasn't played out. And if it hasn't played out, there's no point hoping it's going to change.

This is the hardest thing to do. And the way I do it is remove myself from the equation, not I've got it wrong. What happens is you go in with a set of assumptions, you see something in the market, you make some assumptions, you look at fundamentals and say, okay, this is what they're trying to do. If they're able to do that, then this is the kind of future that I see and you monitor along the way. And the minute that that changes, those set of assumptions change or new information comes in, something changes in the market, then you need to reassess. And Ben's gone through and reassessed and said, well, a lot of this has changed. That's okay. How are they performing and what future do I see? Okay, this is the future I see. And then he's gone and looked at other competing investments and said, well, these have a higher chance of success based on what I see over the one that I have. And he sold the one that he's had. This is a key investing lesson where you don't internalize it, you went wrong. You copper loss, whatever it may be in investing, you just need to get it right most of the time. Not every single time.

Yeah. And I fundamentally put in more into Maple. Right. So like Maple being up still 100, whatever it is, 150, 60% is. I'm still in the profit. Right. And ultimately that was a lot higher. So in March that was up 3 or 400%. So you don't need. It's not like a strike rate of 10 investments and you need five of them to go well. No, it's more about what are the returns, how much allocation you put into them. This is really what we speak about at Collective Shift and you know, what we speak to our members about is really about asset allocation, diversification, risk timelines, but also cutting your ties. Like you said Bergs, like, I see so many people and I talk to so many people that are just holding coins, hoping that they're going to return. Hope is not a good strategy. And you Just because something is down 40, 50, 60% isn't a reason to hold on thinking it's going to come back. If something's down 40 or 50%, it needs to go up 500% to go back to break even. Right. It's not just. It's not down 50%, up 50% to get back to break even. It's not how it works.

Exactly. Hope is not a strategy. If that is what you're relying on, you shouldn't be investing in it. And even if you find this really, really tough, let's say you are holding Polygon and you feel the same way as Ben with and you've looked at the Collective Shift analysis and you can't bring yourself to sell it, but you know you should, but you can't push the button, Just do a portion of it, do half of it, allocate it to something else. So you still got a horse in the race. If you feel that way and you can't mentally get over that hurdle, that's okay. It's not about being perfect, it's just about adjusting. Because if you know that you should adjust and the set of assumptions you had are no longer true, you know you need to take some action based on your investing thesis, take some action when those things change.

Yeah. And you've also got to take into account the macro market. Right. The reality is that Ethereum hasn't performed well. Layer 2 certainly aren't performing well. And the macro market in terms of the. The financial ecosystem is not rewarding risk on assets right now. So like if you want to keep backing altcoins, it's just not going to go your way. Now you can still hold altcoins and I think for a lot of people just holding on is an okay strategy. But you've got to make sure that the assets you're holding have fundamental value and will come back. In a bull market, if you're holding shit won't turn into good, Right? Good will turn into good. But you need to make sure what you're holding actually has fundamental value. And there's, as we mentioned before, there's so many more coins this cycle, there's so many more chains, so many more ecosystems. You need to make sure you're backing the right horse. And this is where really that research comes into play. You've got to have the right fundamentals, it's going to have the right sort of sentiment, it's got to have the right narratives. And that is what equals price going up. And it's really what we're focusing on, a collective shift. These are only two altcoins out of a lot that we've, you know, reviewed and analyzed and there's been a lot that have performed really well. And you've got to just make sure that you're allocating your portfolio correctly, especially with the way bitcoin's going and, and taking a lot of that dominance. A top heavy portfolio, Bitcoin Sol and Eat is performing relatively well. But if you're holding a lot more altcoins right now, you're not going to be performing that well. So having the allocation right at the right time is also just equally as important.

Absolutely. And even behind the scenes like to come to this conclusion. Ben, you know, our researchers are always researching, they're always looking at the latest, you know, data that comes out. They'll report it back to the team. You guys have specific team meetings. You would had a meeting about this specific thing and using all of that data, market conditions, sentiment, everything else, things that haven't been able to execute on in that project, you would have come to that conclusion.

Yeah, exactly. Right. And this is where having, you know, a research team to, to outsource that decision to. Right. Not everything, but I still need to make the call in the day. But to have the team do that research come back to me with an independent view. Not just me googling or going to YouTube going Matic. Because what's going to come up is just basically people agreeing with my decision. That's going to be, you know, that bias Mentality where you're looking for positive biases to, to, to approve your decision. There's inherent bias in everything that we do, so having an independent crew look at that just makes everything so much easier. Because you're looking at factual data.

Exactly. And we can ask them. We could be like, great, still man this argument or break this completely down. How is this going to go wrong? And even like, you know, scenario plan for this. What can happen in the future with all the other projects that, you know, are they talking shit or is it legit? I will actually get you to clarify one thing, Ben. Early on you said that you're a major investor in Maple. Do you just want to clarify what that means?

Major. Major is in. Major in my portfolio. So it's one of my biggest altcoins. I'm not like a, a seed investor. I don't own 10 of the company. What I mean by major, I mean that is probably my largest altcoin holding outside of Ethan Soul. So when I say major, it's just something that I'm, you know, I've backed for the last three or four years. They're actually going to be in token 249 in Singapore, so I'm keen to go catch up with them. This episode will probably be out during the week I'm there, so I'm excited to catch up with them. But yeah, there's some, some altcoins that I have different allocations to. Right. Some, you know, high risk, you know, potentially high reward have a lower percentage. Some that I think are less risky have high percentages and that changes and fluctuates ultimately as well, when you invest at $5 and it gets to $30, that's going to be a larger percentage. Right. So just trying to continue to allocate and balance is super important.

Absolutely. And you know, you probably not going to get near the gains short term that you would have when you invested a long time ago. But you see the potential in this project and the gains are still going to be significant is very important.

To do exactly right.

And mate, another point, people should be talking about this more. Like whenever you meet someone that has money, the first question people will ask them is, how did you make your money? That is not the question you want to ask them. The question you want to ask them is, how did you almost lose it all? Because that will give you a much better lesson for when you cross that bridge and, and you won't lose it all. You won't make the mistake that they did. Learning from people's Mistakes and things. That is just the most valuable thing. This is why we find entrepreneurs, organizations so valuable, because they tell you, no, I tried that. Here's what happened. Here's how I ruined it. Here's how I almost lost my entire company. And they are the lessons that stay with you and you learn so much more from those. Rather than I had this random coin that 100x or I made a really great investment in a mining company. Well, great. What does that teach me? Nothing.

You don't learn anything from that. You learn from the. The pain, the suffering, the optimizing. There's 1% moves. Like, those are the mindset, those are the things. Not just like, I picked a coin and went up 20x. You're not going to learn too much from that.

Exactly. And a lot of this just becomes a part of your mental model as you progress. And you innately know, like, I could look at a project, I could read through it and I'll go, no, trash. Because I've probably got like 50, 60 checkboxes in my head of things that I've seen previously, things that have gone wrong, things that have gone right, specific words they use, what they're promising and how difficult those things are. And you get to that stage through all of these lessons. So talk more to your friends or your community or collectorship. Talk amongst the members about the lessons that you've had from investing.

Love that. Awesome, guys. Hopefully that was helpful. Again, we always give you transparency here at Collective Shift Trust and transparency is a major value for us here. We always want to give you the wins and the losses, you know, giving you the real beans. We know how it is, we know how difficult is as an investor, and there's nothing worse than hearing some bloke or chick online telling you how easy it is to make money, because it is absolutely nonsense. So hopefully that's been helpful. Burgs, do you want to add a point on that?

Yeah, I was just going to say your best investment was hiring me, mate. We just need to acknowledge that.

I don't know, I don't know. Bit of headache, to be honest. But anyway, we have to outsource that decision, get some data on that.

Oh, yeah, mate, yeah, no worries. I'll bring you back the data. You choke on it, mate. 10,000% bonus, let's go.

Yeah, we'd love for you to share it around, folks. If you enjoyed that, send it to a friend in crypto to help them on their investing journey. It's how we grow the podcast each and every week and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.