8 Years of Crypto Advice for Time-Poor Investors (11 Lessons)

Guys, I've spent the last day going through and reflecting on my last eight years of full time investing in crypto. And I've put together my top 11 lessons that I've learned as a time poor investor on how I've made millions of dollars in crypto and also how I've lost a lot of money in this space. And I put these together not only for myself as a reminder, but I want to share these lessons with you for your own benefit and particularly those time poor investors. I know a lot of you running a business, you have a career, you have a family. This space is moving faster than ever. We're seeing cycles within cycles, we're seeing assets come and go, we're seeing tops, bottoms, markets selling off market, pumping faster than ever. There is hundreds of thousands more tokens than ever before. And unless you are full time in this space, it is very, very, very difficult to stay on top of everything. So I want to share with you today what my lessons are. If you are time poor, you're not full time in crypto, you're busy doing other things. These are the lessons that I wish I had when I first started out. So I didn't go through the first few years trying to figure out on my own losing a bunch of money, missing tops, not taking profits. And I've put these lessons together so you can take advantage of them and really take these into this upcoming, back into this bull market when the market starts to go again so you can actually take profits out and make sure you don't miss the top again because it's super painful when you do. So there's 11 lessons cracking. These are ordered kind of in order, but also they are all just as important as each other. So I want to just dive in straight away. So number one is the crypto cycles come and go. I think the four year cycle has been a really big narrative, obviously that has pushed us into this cycle so far. Number and at the moment it's questionable whether that four year cycle is still intact. But I think the big one is that patterns of previous cycles aren't always the same. You know, history does repeat, but it does rhyme. But the big one that we're seeing this time around is that the cycles are happening faster than ever and the cycles within cycles. So we saw late last year we saw the, the meme coin run, we had an AI run, we had the 2017 coins run. We're seeing narratives come and go really, really fast and primarily they're led by speculation on different sectors where people can make money. And ultimately, I think a lot of the fundament and fundamental tokens have been left behind and pretty much anything that didn't have a lot of value got pumped. But also now on the drawdown, we've seen the biggest retracements in bull markets. We've seen before in those sectors where meme coins are down 70, 80%, AI tokens are down 80, 90%, etc. Etc. So the big one here is that yes, the cycles and the structure is looking similar, however, it is not the same and we're really seeing bitcoin separate itself from the altcoins. And again, one of the biggest key takeaways for me is ensuring that always we have a large percent of bitcoin in our portfolio because all of these altcoins are being dragged down quite substantially. And I think a lot of the tokens coming back out of this correction are not going to hit all time highs. We haven't even seen ETH hit all time highs. In fact, ETH is about the same as where it's been, you know, the last four years and a lot of the defi projects etc, and not getting a lot of value. And I think the biggest thing right here is we are coming to crunch time with a lot of these altcoins and needing to actually showcase their fundamental value, otherwise they're not going to last. If you're holding a bunch of tokens, hoping they're going to return, hoping they're going to go up, you know, again, hope is not a strategy. And I've been really focused on simplifying my portfolio over the last few months, reducing my lower cap alts just because the way the cycle is playing out is far more towards bitcoin and fundamental assets over this next sort of couple of years versus the lower cap high speculative assets are really far feeling the pinch right now. Number two is I think a lot of people forget that crypto is part of a larger financial market. And you know, we've had so much amazing positive news over the last few months with crypto, whether it be the strategic bitcoin reserve, obviously having a pro crypto presidency. You know, we've got, you know, micro strategy buying a bunch of bitcoin, we've got the SEC dropping a heap of cases on crypto companies. We've seen the stable coins, you know, really being promoted by Trump even today at the the block works event. You know, fundamentally there is some super strong things going on in the space. However, prices are still being suppressed. That ultimately is because of the macro conditions. And again, I've been talking about this for a long time. Macro liquidity is the thing that drives crypto. You can have the best project in the world, but unless you're seeing risk on behavior from investors, then the markets are not going to increase. Now we've been in quantitative tightening for a little while. So quantitative tightening is essentially when they're reducing the amount of liquidity in the economy that is starting to slow down. We had the FOMC meeting the other day where they're starting to reduce quantitative tightening and hoping it'll end by middle of the year. But again, we're still in that quantitative tightening area. Where we saw back in 2021, where we saw markets really pump was quantitative easing. Right. When markets increase the liquidity and that finds its way to risk on assets. A lot of people have been saying, you know, when quantitative easing, they've made it very, very clear that they are not going to start quantitative easing unless the basically the economy goes to absolute shit and they your rates go to zero and they start pumping qa. That is not in the the for view at the moment. So we've really got to Follow the Fed. M2 money supply expansion is expected to grow and we are seeing that grow already. There is a huge correlation between bitcoin and the M2 money supply. That's really positive news. We do need Bitcoin to grow for the altcoins to go as well. Right. Altcoins aren't necessarily going to outperform Bitcoin. You know, we need Bitcoin to really lead the market before everything drives behind. Trump is pushing for Jerome Powder continue to reduce interest rates. There's a bit of a battle there going on, I think between the Fed and also Donald Trump. But I think again over the course of this year, hopefully we start to see better macro liquidity conditions and then we can start to get in a really easy trade. Honestly is just waiting for quantitative tightening to stop entering the markets in risk off. And then as the economy starts to expand and we start to see the liquidity slowing down, that's kind of the best swing trade we've seen over the last few years in crypto. But ultimately we've got to really focus here on the stock market. And this is where macro liquidity again comes into play. The stock market is not looking that healthy at the moment. It's in about a 10% correction, which is an official correction area. And investors are really feeling the pinch and are looking much more risk off than risk on. Hence why they're coming out of crypto and looking to more risk off areas. So again, we're kind of tied to that. I think we're going to chop sideways here for a little bit and then hopefully sort of back into this year when we start to see rates come down. They have promised 50 basis point rate reduction. Hopefully once that comes down and we start to see, you know, quantitative tiny ending, the markets will start to increase and recover. But again, I think bitcoin is really going to lead the way and we'll hope to see altcoins recover, but maybe for a lot of them, not recover as much as what we would have hoped. That's number three is crypto corrections are super normal. Guys, I've been, we've spoken about this so much. It can be super painful in the moment. But I've been through so many corrections and I remember back like, man, when I, when I put like, probably my biggest investment into bitcoin, which is maybe like, I think it was like 2018 or 2019, when Bitcoin was chopping sideways for literally two years, you know, I thought we were at the bottom. It felt so painful around that $10,000 mark. So painful. When we got to that 10,000 level, I said, right, this is the bottom. I'm really going to go hard here. And literally over the next month we, we dumped to like 4,000. So I was down 60% on my, on my big investment at that point. And that was like, absolutely brutal, right? You know, no one really know, believed it was going to come back that thought it was going to be the end of bitcoin. And then over the next, you know, essentially four or five years, we went from 4,000 to like 110,000. So in the moment, it can be really, really painful. I'd really just urge you all just to step back, breathe, remember that this is not going to be forever. And you know, this drawdown that we're in at the moment, you know, bitcoin's only come down about 30%, you know, in previous cycles. Even in the 20, 21 cycle, you know, we were down more than 30%. Like I want to say like 12 times. Right. Obviously, altcoins a lot deeper. And altcoins can feel very painful. And back to my other lesson just around those cycles is that, you know, if you're holding assets in sectors that are down a lot, like maybe you're holding a shitty meme coin that's down like 80, 90%, that asset needs to go up, you know, 5, 6, 700% to go back to break Even okay. And you know, we're not seeing that speculative drive at the moment, which can be very difficult. So one, you can, you know, in these corrections you've got a few options. One is you can sell down those assets into, you know, Bitcoin. And I did this probably three months ago. I shared with our members and what I did with my portfolio was just, I cut those assets because I just felt that again, macro conditions weren't going to be great. Build up my BTC stack and went a little bit more risk off. If you haven't made those decisions and now you're looking at your portfolio going, oh shit, what should I do? You can still cut the crap, you know, and you can move them back into, you know, something again, like stables or btc. You can add more to your positions and reduce your overall buy price so you can lower your entry price. And that's just going to, you know, reduce the amount the asset needs to grow to get back, to break even. Or obviously you can just huddle through it. They're really your options. It really depends on the, on the asset and the altcoin and the sector. But again, at the moment, these conditions for these high risk assets are not going to be great. And the correction is going to be far more painful when we go to the downside. That's number four is just remaining patient. And I think I see, you know, a lot of people and even when I talk to our, you know, our clients at Collective Shift, that sometimes people are making trades based on, you know, being bought. And I made, you know, some, some brutal mistakes back, you know, 2017, 2018 on some projects where I just didn't remain patient. I mean, Synthetics was one that I was an early investor in and sold before it was, I was actually invested in before it was called Synthetics, was called Haven. And I sold that after about eight months of it just going sideways. And I just didn't really know what was going on with the asset and kind of just gave up, sold it. They upgraded to synthetics and it just went on this huge like 100x plus run. Like I literally, you know, we lost out on millions of dollars because of it. But it was a huge reminder as to why you need to remain patient. And you know, projects that are building good things is what I like to focus on. And you know, if your project is building good things and it, the correction is just because of the macro conditions, well then hold on again, price and value are two separate things. Just because an asset is down in price doesn't mean it's any less valuable. However, you don't want to sort of over trade and remain, you know, impatient. You know, we had a guy the other day that sold out of one of the projects that I'm investing one of our members because he sort of gave up on it, went into another asset. I think he went from prime to hype, I think, or something like that. Got out of all of his prime, and then in the weeks later, prime pumped like 60%, and then hype was down. Right. So you've kind of got to be a little bit cautious when making trades in these periods of times when we're chopping sideways, because again, there's. You're not really going to be able to outperform too much. You're really just trying to minimize your downside and remain patient, knowing the market's gonna come back and, you know, not get too emotional. Lesson number five is looking at key project metrics. I see a lot of investors really oversimplify the idea of buying an asset. Just because some guy online talks about a project that they think that's good, they can just jump in and, you know, hope for the best. And we're seeing again, over the last two years, the only real asset that's outperformed Bitcoin has been Solana. So you have to be super careful about what you're buying because a lot of these projects are not seeing a lot of value. There's hundreds and hundreds of thousands more tokens created every month than ever before. So if you've got the amount of. Same amount of liquidity, the same amount of buyers, and you've got literally hundreds of thousands or millions more tokens to buy, then, you know, of course these assets are not going to be able to find a lot more growth like we've seen in previous times, because you need a lot more liquidity to do that. We haven't seen that liquidity. So only certain projects can outperform. So really basic thing, if your time poor is really just to look at not just the market cap, but the FDV and token unlocks. So looking at why a lot of these projects decline in value over time is because they don't have a lot of, you know, tokens coming out in the. In the short term, which can increase the price of the asset. And then they have a lot of token unlocks over time, inflation rates, et cetera. So you really want to look at things like total supply. So Alluvium, for example, has nearly 9.5 million tokens right now. It's got 7.4 million in circulating supply, which means they've still got about 2 million to go. But we've really seen projects like these in the gaming space or layer one blockchains, over time really increase their total supply. And you can see here like in terms of market cap, you know, even back in March of last year, the market cap got nearly to the peak of where we were back in 2021, right for the price. But if you look at the price of the asset back in March 2024, the price was still down like 90%. That is because the amount of tokens that come into supply have increased so much. So you essentially, as you increase the supply, you need multiples more investment into the asset for the market cap to grow, for the price to grow. So again, market cap was only probably 25%, 30% off the peak back in March 2024, from 2021. But again back in March 2024, if you look at the price only 124 versus $1800, which is just, you know, insane. So token supply is a big one and unlocks again another way to offset that. Let's say you're holding a lot of Solana. Solana has inflation rates on its tokens. You can stake your Solana or some of these assets and you can get rewarded for one, securing the network. But two, you can use that as an offset to the inflation rate. So it's just a good way to sort of reduce the inflation that you are copying on your investment. Number six is really managing your fear and greed. And this is a big one that I know a lot of people that haven't been through many cycles really feel. And that FOMO really tends to lead people to buying at the wrong time. So you end up having really high priced entry points. And then also on the fear side, when the market retraces, you start to get super fearful and super frantic when the market goes down. If you are time poor again, a big one I would recommend is just looking long term. When you are feeling super euphoric and you're feeling like you're a legend and you are the best investor ever and you're talking to your friends about your investments and you're taking screenshots of your portfolio, that is the biggest signal to start taking some profits off the table. All right? The biggest manage that greed, understand it. Remember where we are now in sort of this fear, not sure if it's going to come back. Recognize when you're in that greed scenario and take profits off the Table. Just looking at the Fear and Greed index, the simplest strategy is just to follow that, in my opinion. So buy when. Obviously it's so simple to say this, buy when. It's very fearful. Selling is greedy. Obviously oversimplified here, but honestly, the hardest times to take profits is when you're feeling so euphoric. It's going to feel gut wrenching. It's going to feel like you're making the worst decision ever. It's going to feel like, you know, you, you're stabbing someone. I remember when I sold most of my, you know, profits back in 2021, when I rode the metaverse up, when I got in pretty early, you know, when meta, sorry, when Facebook renamed to meta and I sold a lot of money, it felt horrific. It felt like I was making the worst decision ever because it literally felt like we were never going to go down. And, you know, we can reflect back in November when Trump was, you know, being elected and all these promises, like, again, we felt it wasn't going to go down. We felt now a few other things happen which we weren't the market wasn't expecting, but those the periods of times where it's a really good indicator to remind yourself, hey, things are getting a bit frothy here. I'm feeling really awesome. I'm feeling pretty greedy. I'm feeling euphoric. Let's take some chips off the table. All right. Same on the, on the, on the fear side, when the market's down, when there's a lot of people throwing in the towel. We saw this when Solana went down to $20, you know, three or four years ago, everyone threw in the towel, everyone said it was dead. And then Solana went on one of the biggest runs we've seen from an altcoin in the top, top 10 in a long time. So just remember, manage that fear and greed. Take yourself back. What advice would you give to your. If you could duplicate yourself in those moments, what advice would you give to them? Right? Or what advice would you give to a friend at that moment? It just takes the personalization out of it sometimes. You know, we are our own worst enemy as investors. Lesson number seven, as I mentioned, the start is cycles within cycles. Really. Like I'm just seeing these. The market is moving faster than ever. So as a time poor investor, someone that's busy, I really recommend not chasing these mini cycles. You know, you probably would have noticed you were chasing some meme coins, you're chasing some AI coins. You know, I did the same. I didn't end up getting into AI outside of my prime investment but I got into some meme coins, did really well, probably grew 3 or 4x but then didn't take profits and then because I was busy and the market went down and again we're back to square one again. So remembering that cycles within cycles are happening extremely fast and when you are time poor you're ultimately most likely going to miss the top because of how fast the space is moving. So what I like to do is really go heavy on, on bigger fundamental assets and sectors that I know are going to be valuable in the future I. E. You know some, some layer ones, some defi little bit of AI but ultimately you know, really focusing on BTC and some of those bigger projects because I know they're going to grow in value over time and I know that I don't need to spend all day, every day checking the charts and worrying what's going on because if you're doing that that means that you're probably over allocated, you're trying to make too much and, and again when you're time poor you're going to make poor decisions or you're going to miss what's going on and then ultimately your portfolio is going to be hurt. Off the back. Number eight is super, super important. This is having a proper sell strategy. You know we teach this at Collective Shift, we do a lot of self strategy workshops because honestly it's one of the hardest things to do because again back to the idea of the greed. When you're euphoric and you don't have a plan, it's the hardest thing to sell. You feel as though you never need to sell. It's always going to go up. I see a lot of people not taking profits at the right time because they think that, you know, their portfolio is just going to grow forever and it's not the case. I really, really recommend taking chips off the table as you go up, you know, have a goal in mind. What is your goal? What do you want to do with your portfolio? Speaking to a client of ours the other day, he's got 20 BTC, maybe 1.5 mil in alts and he's got, you know, a big mortgage that he wants to pay off. You don't need to do it all at once. Right on the way up you can take chips off the table as your altcoins are coming back and as they're growing. Takes 20% off the top, take 25%, put it in your offset, do something with it where you can actually Showcase, you've done something with, with the money. Because when it's numbers on a screen, it doesn't feel real, doesn't feel real until you put that money in your bank account. And when that money hits your bank account, it feels real. And you're like, okay, now I actually feel as I've done something with this money, it's really, really empowering. Set those targets. You don't need to try and sell the exact top and sell everything. It is, it's impossible to just get in and get out hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars at the exact top. It doesn't happen like that. You know we did some, some research recently on like how long the market and certain assets stay in the top. 5, 10, 15% of a certain cycle. It's literally days. So you're waiting years for this like five day window. And again in the moment it's very, very hard to actually know. So taking chips off as you go up, making sure you lock in some profits. So again you don't round trip another cycle is your round trip again, potentially waiting another three or four years, which is absolutely the worst thing you want to do. You can automate this as well. You can set, you know, put these on exchanges, have limited orders, things like that. It's another way to do it. Buy long term assets. Really a big one for me. I put this, you know, a lot of content out recently, you know, well actually over the last three or four months or members again around like really stacking your BTC and following long term assets. Bitcoin is still up 50% over the last 12 months while everything else is nuked. Right. It is compounding at 40%. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in crypto, you don't need to continue to bet the farm on altcoins which by looking at the market, none of them has outperformed Bitcoin outside of Solana. If you've held all the way up and all the way down, okay, yes, you could have made money if you were super in, in memes or AI really fast, really quickly getting in, getting in and out. But for a lot of you that I know a time for business owners, whatever, stack BTC and build good assets around the outside and you don't go over allocating on a certain altcoin. Right. So for me it's a big chunk of btc then having some layer ones, then having some defi, then having some high risk stuff around the outside, really getting that construction, that portfolio right. And looking for strong fundamentals because they're the projects that are going to rebound the strongest. We've seen that, you know, prime bounce really well the other day, Syrup's been bouncing. We're starting to see fundamental projects really come through and shine. And I think that's where investors are going to be looking at at the back half this year once the market starts to really ramp up again is where are those assets and sectors that are going to actually give me something that's providing value to something, not just hype, right. And speculation. And yes, I do think the memes and things will still be a sector, don't get me wrong. But we're not going to see hundreds and thousands of these tokens just being, you know, launched overnight and all just running up, you know, like we, like we saw last year. This is what happened back in 2017 and 2021, where we had these different sectors, different run up. We had the ICO boom. Whether we had the NFT boom, we had the defi summer. These sectors come and go. And for me what lasts over time is strong fundamentals and projects that are delivering value. And for me, the layer one blockchains is obviously, you know, a top space. And again for time poor investors, you don't have time to be chasing these smaller cap coins. Lesson number 10, dollar cost average and accumulate over time. So one of the biggest things I did when I grew my portfolio was I literally took all of my salary and all the money I had for two years from 2018 to 2020 and I dollar cost average and I bought bitcoin every single week. Right. I use my income, I use dividends for my business, I use profits. I just accumulate as much as I could and it's so boring and I'm an all or nothing guy. So I totally get it that it's very hard to just be boring and accumulate. But honestly, it's the, it's the best and quickest way that you can really build your wealth up over time. And yes, you can rely on the market growth to happen, but I'm using Bitcoin as a savings account. I got Bitcoin on our balance sheet. I am investing consistently into BTC because I know it's going to be and it already is a leading asset. And then I've got my alts around the outside which I have added a little bit to. But honestly, over the last year I've just been continuing to buy BTC and it's why my portfolios, it's outperforming and you can sit here and go oh yeah, well that's boring, Ben. Like, you know, anyone can just say, buy bitcoin, what's the truth, right? It's outperforming everything. And will I do I think it'll change at some point. Do I think alts will run and maybe bitcoin consolidates? Yes, I do think that. But the macro and the financial sector right now is not in a position where alt's going to outperform. So why are you in a bunch of altcoins? It does not make sense. You're literally holding these things down to the ground. And again, I hold altcoins, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that you want to continue to build up a good chunk of BTC that's consistently compounding at 40% annually and consistently going to grow over time. And if you can get to a million bucks right, in Bitcoin at 40% a year, like you can do the math, right? Or you get to 10 million or 5 million, right, or whatever that number is, 500K. If you can get to those numbers with your BTC stack, you're fine. You don't need to continue to bet the farm. If you have a little bit of crypto, yes, I understand why you want to bet on alts and try and get the home run. But as you get bigger portfolio and as you have less and less time, build a good, good portfolio and send. Second last lesson here, filter who you listen to. Like really like when I first got it into crypto, it was just like so much noise. It still is. So many shillas, so many people just pumping altcoins, you know, everyone's got affiliate links, everyone's getting paid to promote stuff, you know, really try and prioritize and filter where you listen to your content like a man. This is even in life, even on your Instagram feed and stuff like filter who you listen to. And obviously I would recommend listening to Ask as we're independent and we put out research and we provide research to, you know, coinbase, Coin Spot, swiftex, all the leaders. But there's other great people out there as well. But really filter who you listen to. And I also find that one of the biggest mistakes that people can make is they buy in an altcoin and then they go and try and find people that have the same opinion as them to make themselves feel better. And I've seen people lose a shitload of money from essentially buying into crappy altcoins that are like cults, that have cult like communities that are just perma bullish and run these things in the ground. Like don't listen to an echo chamber, listen to two sides of the story. I like to listen to people who are bullish and bearish or on all of my investments. Try not to be emotional, be logical and don't live in the clouds. Like live in reality and understand that sometimes you made a wrong call. I made shitload of bad investments right? That's the reality of the situation. Never going to be 100% right portfolio allocation is key Build your BTC stack. Don't over allocate into altcoins. If you've gone too hard into altcoins recently, you've been burnt. Balance the risk with long term goals. When we see the market pump, take some profits, put them into stables, put them into BTC. But don't let altcoins really get into 30, 40, 50% ranges because if you go on the downside when you've got an altcoin at 40 or 50% of your portfolio, your portfolio is going to be absolutely smacked. All right? So be careful with that. And again, we looked at a portfolio allocation comparison recently. You would have just outperformed everyone if you just held BTC over the last two years. Like you know people over complicate this whole space. If you just hold a bunch of BTC split into some good alts, diversify in good projects, you think you're going to have value in the future that are not just a short term hype cycle. You will outperform every day of the week. Hopefully that's been helpful. If you like this video and you want more lessons, insights, strategies, let me know in the comments below what you think. Please share this with a friend if you find this was valuable and you think your friend needs to hear some of these lessons. Leave me. Subscribe if you liked the video and I'll see you on the next video. Cheers guys.