I Made $1M With Crypto, Here’s How I’m Preparing For The Bear Market

I made over a million dollars investing into crypto and I've helped countless people do the same. But before I made all that money, I was just guessing my way through the cycles, not understanding that was actually a data source and strategy that 90% of people don't get access to. Back in 2017, I made six figures on paper after starting out with literally nothing from the bunk bed of my bedroom. And then I round tripped the entire thing and lost it all because I didn't understand the strategy and the way to get ready for for the bear market. In 2021, I learned my lesson. I stuck to my plan and I made over 3000% returns audited by my tax accountant because I actually took profits and I executed on my plan and it changed my life forever. Now with the market chopping sideways and this year's been very difficult and a potential bear market ahead of us, I want to make sure you're prepared for what happens if we go further lower from here. And also to get you prepared if we do go higher from here, what to do at the top to get ready for the bear market using the seven step system that I personally use and literally help thousands of people across the world imp this system. I'm going to help you today do that to get ready to not make the same mistake that so many people do. The reason why millions of dollars of money gets wiped out before the start of a bear market is because people don't lock in profits because they don't understand how to do that. And I want to show you what selling actually looks like because this ultimately is what people try and do when they get into crypto or they've been in it for a little while. They think they could be a genius. You think you can just pick the top of the market or pick the bottom of the market? Guess what guys, it doesn't exist. You need to be able to take profits systematically, otherwise you have this oh no scenario. And the oh no scenario is when you think it's going to go higher or you adjust your price targets higher and then the downward slope happens. All right? You're really supposed to take profits on the way up because that downward slope is so painful that historically we see altcoins drop 80, 90%. Bitcoin even drops that, and we see that drop in even lower down on altcoins, sometimes go up to 95%. Now, as you can see here, I uploaded a research piece recently to our clients talking about the previous five years of my portfolio. And this is audited by my tax Accountant that we have very transparent policies here at Collective Shift. As one of the world's leading research companies, every trade is transparent. One of the most important things, as you see here 2021, I made over 3,000% returns. But the year before and the year after, I was down. And if you go right back to 2017, 2018, you'll see I had a huge negative loss, all right? And the reason I did that is because I didn't take profits. Now, the key lesson here, the thing that I want all of you to understand, if you don't take profits, you cannot lock in and harvest the growth of a big upwards trajectory of a cycle. Now, we saw this year, you know, and have seen all this year, that the market has been chopping sideways. One of the biggest things that I did that allowed me to now process buying my parents a house, which was my number one goal of this cycle, is I took profits on syrup. Now, syrup was one of my favorite projects of this cycle. I still hold it. And back in June, I took profits at 560% on syrup. And the reason I was able to do that, if you look at, you know, the April lows, I actually started investing and getting pretty heavy back in Feb. If you look at the, you know, April lows, where you had the tariff bottom to syrup, like we topped out, we had a massive growth zero, went up 650%. Now it's given back all of those returns and it's back down as now 17%. So if you're not taking profits during this period up here, you're leaving so much money on the table. And the reason I did that is because I had a systematic exit strategy, which I want to share. What so many people do is they see this period, they get euphoric, they get excited, they don't buy until the market's up 600%. And now you've sort of been bleeding low. And that is a very painful position to be in. I get it. However, time will return, the market will recover, in my opinion. But if you're not taking profits on your outperformers, well, then of course, you know, the market is going to be very painful and you're going to give back all of those losses and pull things back. Now, a couple of ways to think about systematic selling of your crypto, no matter whether it's altcoins, whether it's Bitcoin, no matter what it is. All right, I look at a couple of different indicators. Number one is the rsi, the Relative Strength Index, very basic indicator but you can see here on the chart, like when we get to periods of very high euphoric, emotional periods of the market where we're getting above this sort of 70 level on the RSI for Bitcoin, you know, it usually lags that like blow off top period for crypto, you know, in those weeks and months to follow. All right, when we start to get the RSI periods that are far higher than normal, you know, you can start to expect that, hey, maybe we're heading into territories of overexposure and profits need to be taken the other side of very basic, just the fear and greed index. If you will look at the fear and greed index at different levels, it's also going to give you, you know, a good understanding of where the market's topped and bottom. All right, Same on the flip side, when we're down where we are now, the alternative can be true as well in terms of buying during these levels. Now, what I like to do when I take profits is I like to, you know, take and trim my portfolio on the way up. So there's a range of different ways that you can like sell your portfolio. And we outline this in the seven step strategy. But one of the things that I like to utilize is just taking a dollar cost averaging approach. Now, it's a very boring way to do it, but the more simple you can do this, the easier it is to not try and pick the market top and be absolutely perfect. Once you take 20, 30, 40% off the top as you're taking profits out, you can stack it in stable coins or you can use those profits to achieve. What you want to do for me was buy my parents a House in 2021. It was to build my research company, Collective Shift, you know, and now it's more accumulating more bitcoin. And when you understand that, you can start to take systematic approach. If you just rely solely on the sentiment of the market and you rely solely on emotions, then you're never going to be able to actually execute on a logical basis. And I put this in the platinum playbook. The platinum playbook is, you know, the playbook that we myself and our clients abide by in terms of the philosophies and principles of taking profits and actually making money. In crypto, one of the most important parts is that emotional factor. And I'll talk about this a little bit further in the video, but the emotional cycle is that euphoria, optimism, disbelief, capitulation, fear and denial that you have to come up against. And this in the Stock market on Wall street, if you look at the Wall street cheat sheet is, you know, something that plays out over years in crypto. You could have all these emotions in a week. So you must control that. And I'll share a little bit more of that in the video in a second. Now, the next one is taxes. It's something that a lot of people don't really think about when taking profits and optimizing their portfolio and getting ready for the next period of the cycle. But for sophisticated investors and high net worth who we work with, taxes are very, very important. Now, for a lot of you that may have gone into crypto recently, you're probably going to be thinking, well, this is all well and good, Ben, but, you know, if we go into a bear market, I'm actually down on my altcoins at. Right. And that doesn't change the fact of, like, understanding your strategies to, you know, whether or not you're buying altcoins that you need to de risk or if you're underwater on certain things. How can you look at, you know, tax loss harvesting to offset these losers against future capital gains? This is something where I was in the past, where I took a lot of profits back in 2021, as an example, you know, I made 3,000% returns, but I rolled a lot of that profit and cash right into my business because I wanted to start that and wasn't really prepared of what's to come for tax. And I got absolutely smashed by the tax ban. Have to pay back six figures of tax that I couldn't afford because the cash was rolled up into my business as an example. And I wasn't prepared for that. And what happened was I got copped a massive tax bill and an interest rate. And this is something that I've seen before. And now that was a bit more of a strategic move because I needed the capital to start my business. But I've seen people in the past where they sell crypto for crypto. They don't understand that that's a taxable event. And then once again, you hit with this tax bill and now you've just got this new token that you have to pay the tax from, and that token's going down and now you're back to square one again. Tax is a big part of what we work with our clients on. So if you go, one of the things that we bring in on a bon session level is like, you know, tax experts that, you know, go through the play by play. One of the basic things you can do is you can literally just go over to something like crypto tax calculator. I think it's recently renamed to SEMM or something. So if you go over here, you literally plug in your wallets like your ledger and any exchanges with a read only view and it'll calculate your profit and loss here to help you with your tax. That's really helpful. Now if you're a collective shift member, you'll get a discount on using some of these services. I also like to, you know, think about more like structure and how am I structuring my assets to, you know, really position myself to be tax optimized. So for me as a business owner, I like, I like to accumulate bitcoin and crypto under my company structure. It allows me to use pre tax dollars versus post tax dollars. It allows me to then kick the tax down the road and use the full capital that I have available to get in the market. Some other people and clients we work with, like trusts, depending where you are, like LLCs or self directed IRAs, there's a range of different ways you can allocate this, but it's definitely something to think about and it's something we work with our clients with. You can also go and just, you know, literally speak to your accountant and get the best support that you can. But I would like to do that personally to be proactive rather than reactive because once you've taken profits, it's usually too late. Now if your portfolio feels chaotic and overwhelming and you've these altcoins and there's so much noise, what ends up happening is it leads to poor decisions. The best clients I work with have a simple portfolio. They have very few wallets, one if any, you know, and also few exchanges. They simplify their portfolio because so many people think that you need to add more and more altcoins and that's going to create more returns. Newsflash, the more altcoins you have does not equal higher returns. Simplification is really important Now. A big misconception I find in crypto is that you need to have diversification. And you know, one of the things that, you know, we work with on, you know, our analysis style and you know, we've got about 19 or 20 people now, collective shift that work for time and are looking at, you know, different altcoins and you know, getting ahead in the market is diversification is something that a lot of people overthink in crypto. If bitcoin is not going up, if we are not in a bull market, doesn't matter how Good. Your altcoins are, they're all going to go down. Altcoins are leveraged positions on bitcoin. All right, so diversification really doesn't matter outside of having a good foundation of bitcoin because if you don't have a good foundation of bitcoin, you're all in altcoins and you're going to be absolutely just smoked when the market retraces. Because altcoins are going to retrace much further than bitcoin. Like if we think about this year, if we just look at the others market cap which is the altcoin returns outside of the top Bitcoin's at the Moment about down 2% on average. Altcoins down 35% their leverage positions. All right, so it's really important to understand that, that if you don't have conviction in your portfolio and it's chaotic, you need to simplify and de risk. It's really important and I talk about this, that simple is better than complex because simple allows you to allocate and execute your exit strategy. The number one reason why I see people join us for is because they don't take profits and they're not prepared for the bear market. It's because they don't take profits. So the simpler the portfolio, the easier it is to take profits. Guys, that's what I'm trying to say. A lot of people come into our ecosystem and think about crypt because they're following influencers and they're following people that are just putting out noise about buying more alts and buying more this and more that and it turns into hope and people hope that the altcoins are going to come back. A lot of you may be sitting underwater right now. I get it. I've been there personally every single cycle. You have years that are down. But if you're hoping on the altcoins, hoping that they're going to come back and not actually allocating and auditing based on fundamentals, then that's where you're going to go wrong. And that's where I've had to simplify my portfolio all year. Really cut to a strategy and cut a lot of the stuff that I've had in previous cycles because they're not winning and they're not performing and they're well and truly pulling the performance of portfolios back. Now Martin, one of my clients, literally it just posted this in our WhatsApp group the other day. I had to screenshot it so we could mark out his number here. But based on the portfolio allocation that we have and the adjustments we made on our portfolio. He's literally saying that it has been totally life changing as well. One of our other clients also shared, you know, because of collective shift and having that dominant bitcoin portfolio that I got dragged through the mud all year because of this, because I believe that this was going to not be a retail led year. It turned out to be right. I was preparing for, you know, the risk that we weren't going to have that huge blow off top and, you know, he's been very happy to be down, you know, a lot more without it. Another one of our clients rotated bitcoin in physical gold. Another one sold 85% of his Bitcoin last week and bought an apartment in Greece. Genuinely, these clients are making money where the market is chopping sideways and down. And the performance of our portfolio has done really well because of the strategy implementation, adjustment of the portfolio and getting in early. So if you're interested into this, we've got a free training link in the description below. You can go through and see how we operate and then you can, you know, also come and join and execute like these guys. Now let's get back to actually protecting your portfolio because the last thing you want to do is continue to watch this market and just continue to watch your portfolio bleed out. So the next step is looking at like how I would allocate and diversify my portfolio right now. So how do I actually protect those profits? Well, the biggest thing right now is like if I was to allocate right now, if I had nothing, right, starting out fresh. The biggest one is, you know, I think about the 60, 20, 20 rule and you know, the layer one space as an example. Right now I'm probably holding back, waiting to deploy. The biggest one is I'm putting in 20% of my portfolio into stable coins, putting that. And I'm also going to earning a yield on this using something like Coinbase or something like AAVE where I can earn, you know, a good 5, 6, 7%, 10% every year and deploy these stablecoins on dips. That's really important because you want to have, you know, the ability to buy the fear with the dry powder. Now the other one is being able to allocate a majority bitcoin. Now I'm dollar cost averaging in. I want to do this because I believe bitcoin's going a lot higher in the future. It's digital gold. I don't really care about the bear market per se, you know, about bitcoin because, you know, arguably we've probably been in the bear market all year if you think about the data. But I want to be able to accumulate more bitcoin. The thing you want to be prepared for is you want to be able to rotate profits into stable coins when you make money in crypto. All right, so when you make money on your altcoins, you want to be selling down that, putting it into stable coins, getting ready for the next leg up. All right, so this is a bit of a breakdown, more so just to allow you to understand how to not only grow your capital, but how to preserve it. Because that is the most important thing that so many people don't understand. It's very easy to buy, it's hard to sell. So here's how I'd allocate a basic portfolio now and as the market changes, I would look to add into more stable coins as we go. Now, where we are right now in the short term is we're in a bit of this, you know, sideways choppiness period. And you know, one of our senior analysts wrote about this recently, this rally that got rejected off the belief system that we were going to come back got rejected very heavily. There's a lot of great institutional news coming out about like the fundamentals of Vanguard bank of America, all super exciting stuff that has not changed our medium to long term outlook. But in the short term, you know, one of the things is we cannot get complacent. We're still looking at a number of different levels. We don't want to get too excited at these levels because we could still roll over and go lower. And that's why right now what I would be doing is getting ready and building your plan, building your watch list, having a looking at the assets you want to have, getting your exchanges set up, getting your exit strategy right. If you're brand new, I'd be setting up these wallets, setting up the accounts, getting ready to go. If you're in crypto and you're waiting to know what to do, again, we're in a bit of a holding pattern. I personally have reduced my altcoin exposure while we wait this out. And we're waiting for those liquidity movements to go forward. But this is a time to get prepared and not wait for the thing to happen and then be reactionary. Now this is the exact plan you follow to make sure you can ride the cycles up and down in your position with the risk to reward. But more importantly, more than ever, you need to master your psychology. This is where so Many people go wrong. So the goal is to get ready now, understand this identity shift you've got to make. And then that's going to lead us into understanding why fomo, fear overwhelm makes such poor decisions. When it comes to humans and investing, most people actually lose because of poor emotional decisions and their psychology, not because if it's actually a bad trade, if you're checking your prices every morning, looking if it's red or green, you're reacting and you're making poor decisions. And that's why emotionally, you need to remove that as much as possible and create logic. That's why the plan is so important, but the mindset is even more important. So the thing I talk about is the investor identity shift. You have to detach from the daily noise and understand you must become calm under pressure. You have to be patient during these choppiness periods. And when we have corrections, because there's going to be more and there always has been corrections in crypto. This is very normal part, but you have to think long term and have the discipline, risk. And I understand that might be boring to think about, but so many people get caught up in the short term. They don't execute when they should. And what actually happens is they wait to the absolute worst time to sell, which is the complete capitulation point, because in their mind, they're so scared of losing even more money that they capitulate. And that tends to be the bottom. You've got to remember that money is made when the market's down. All right? When the market's down. This is where you get set up as an investor to make the profits on the way up. You don't make money when the market's going up and you're buying. You've got to be reactionary to the market when there's opportunities. But if you're too busy worrying and getting scared about selling, I don't mean selling from executing a trade to make your portfolio better. It's meaning you're actually making emotional decision because you don't have the psychology and the fortitude to last out these corrections. It's painful. I get it. I've written out 70, 80% corrections on my old coins before. It's normal. It's very painful and I get it. It's very hard to do, and I think I've become more accustomed to it. I also work with a performance coach for the last five years, and without that psychology, I'm always going to be behind, you know? Travis is our chief growth officer here at Collective Shift is our head coach and he's done a lot of like psychological investing training for our clients because that's actually the hardest part. You know, the thing that's going to hold you back is you're actually your own head sometimes. So you need to get that psychology piece down pat. So remember, staying calm and focused and having clarity is going to make sure you are a long term winner. If you're thinking too short term and reacting emotionally, that's not a strategy. You're shooting from the hip and you're going to continue to be on the yo, yo. You need to follow that system now. Every 30 days, every 60 days, I'm reviewing this, I'm updating it. You know, a lot of our clients tend to have a very simple portfolio. I think simple wins, as I mentioned, however, when we have bigger corrections, of course you're going to look at the portfolio. Of course you want to know what's going on. It's important to not get carried away though in the noise and chaos that is crypto. Influencers, content, news articles, mainstream media, because they're all going to tell you that it's all going to zero or they're all going to tell you what's going on. A million dollars tomorrow, that's not the case. You have to have that systematic approach and you want to review your portfolio on a basis where you can have credible, trustworthy data and insights. And whether that's me, whether that's someone else, just make sure you're getting the data from the right source because that's what sets people apart from the winners and the losers. And as a reminder, in 2017, you know, looking at these portfolio results here in 2017, I round trip the entire thing. In 2021 I made over 3,000% returns because I executed and locked in my sales strategy. I wasn't guessing, I was prepared and I executed because I had a logical plan and it was hard hitting. Exit button was very difficult. I felt sick in the stomach before I took out literally, you know, life changing amounts of money. But to do that you've got to have that plan in place. And this is the exact approach that's helped me make, you know, over seven figures in crypto. That's helped me go from literally round tripping to have a system making approach. I always think of one of my clients, Chris, who didn't have an exit strategy round tripped his entire portfolio and took profits very simply back in November, paid off his house, happy days. And now he's debt free, living in this cycle with still capital to play. If that sounds like you and you want to be on the actual winning side and have that systematic approach and have my support, please make sure you check out that free training below. I'd love to help you out. Otherwise, make sure you're following the right resources and I'll see you on the next video.