If You Don't Know When To Sell, You're In Trouble
Ben Simpson (7 years in crypto) argues that a clear sell/exit strategy is the most important part of making money in crypto because bull markets move fast and retail investors often buy at peaks and fail to sell. He recommends defining explicit goals (what you would spend profits on), setting price targets (by market cap, not token price), planning logistics (automation/OTC desks, exchanges, custody), accounting for tax/structure and holding periods, and preparing execution steps plus psychological supports (accountability partners, documented plans). He outlines a five-step sell strategy within a broader ten-step process and emphasizes documenting and rehearsing the plan so you can execute during euphoric bull markets.
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You're either in one of these following situations. One is that your portfolio has gone up so much and will continue to go up, but you don't know when to get out. Number two is that you've missed the boat on altcoins that you thought you were going to get into or you wanted to and you looked at that, did a 10, 20, 30x and you're not even in them now. Or number three, you did invest in that altcoin that did a 10 20, 30x but you sold out at a 3x because you didn't know when to sell. I've done all, all of these three scenarios and I've learned a lot over the last seven years. The sell strategy is the most important part of making money in crypto because of how fast this cycle moves.
Been in Crypto now for seven years and we have perfected a 10 step strategic process to help you come up with a strategy. And one of those steps I'm going to share with you today, which is the sell strategy. Cryptocurrency markets are like a roller coaster. You hear about coins, you don't invest into them, they go up. Then you hear about other coins you invest in, those go down. It is a ginormous roller coaster that is extremely hard to navigate. And when you do get on the back of a coin, that does great returns. When do you know when to get out? People online don't tell about the selling strategies, they only talk about the buying. So when do you know when to get out? The sell strategy or the exit plan is the most important part about making money in crypto. In previous cycles, ethereum dropped from US$4400 down to $1600 in just a matter of days. You do not want to be left holding the bag at the end of bull markets because that's when you miss opportunity. And the study has shown in cryptocurrency 90% of people actually lose. And this is backed with the on chain analysis that we see here at Collective Shift is that the retail interest, the retail investments that come into the cryptocurrency market, come in at the top of the market. They are the liquidity for all the whales. And all the OGs and the smart investors that have been investing during that accumulation period are selling into those retail investors because the retail don't know when to sell. They're only buying when it's going up. But that's when you should be selling at the peak, not buying the age old quote from Warren Buffett about being greedy when people Are fearful. And fearful when people are greedy is extremely, extremely paramount in crypto. But you've got to take the emotion out of it and have a logical, step by step strategy to actually sell your crypto. I'm going to share with you how I sold my crypto and how I create my sales strategy in today's video. So what even are profits? And I see this all the time with clients that we work with here at Collective Shift, not thinking about the profit taking strategy. Profits are the lifeblood of your investing. And here in crypto, after bull markets, you really want to think about diversifying because a lot of money can be made in a short amount of time. But you do need to get out and then diversify. Bull markets do not last forever. Crypto runs in four year cycles, as we know. And in this bull market, this is where the profits are going to be made. And we need to ensure that we take that value and capture it so we can diversify or put back into stables or into fiat currency so that we can reinvest back in a bear market. I spoke to a guy recently at a conference who had over $10 million worth of Solana and did not know when to sell. And the thing I spoke to him about, what is your goals, something you want to buy with that money, like what are you trying to achieve? And he didn't know. And the reason he's not going to sell his Solana is because he doesn't know what he's selling it for. If you have a goal in mind, if you have a reason to sell your cryptocurrency, it becomes a lot easier and a lot more logical to actually sell your crypto. In the previous cycle, my goal was to make enough cash in my bank so I could build my company Collective Shift. And I did that because I had a reason to sell. My goal for this bull market is to have enough money to buy my mum and daddy investment property, to diversify myself into buying my own investment property, and then also to put enough money into an index fund where I earn a wage through the 10% or 12% yield I can get through diversifying into the assets. That is my goal. So I know exactly the amount that I need to sell at what price target to get that profit and then diversify. And this is where we need to get more sophisticated thinking about the next step after this bull market. If you have a lot of your wealth tied up in crypto, how are you going to store that wealth? How are you going to diversify and keep that wealth because there's one thing to make it, it's another thing to keep it.
So what does an exit plan even look like? Well, there's a few things you need to think about. First of all, what is that goal? What is that thing of yours that you would love to make out of this crypto cycle? It might be paying off your mortgage, might be paying off your, you know, your kids tuition fees at their university. It might be paying off the credit card, it might be buying a new car. Think about what those goals are and then start to understand how much money you need to achieve that thing. The next is what would be life changing amounts of money for you. It's easy to think about that in a bear market because you don't have that money. But in a bull market when you have that money, I guarant that, that probably starts to creep up when you think $100,000 of life changing money would be life changing in a bear market. When you do have it in your crypto portfolio and you have $100,000 now, $500,000 might be life changing and that's where you get trapped in that cycle if it's never enough. So you wait for the market to continue going up thinking it's going to get higher and then the eventual thing happens where the bull market ends and it crashes and you haven't sold a thing. So write down what your goals are and write down right now what is life changing amounts of money for you and keep that stored to remember in this next bull market. Another thing that you need to is the tax implications. Depending on where you're located, you're going to be paying different tax thresholds. Here in Australia we pay a lot of tax. So if you're wanting to make $100,000 after tax, you may need close to $200,000. There's other discounts and things you need to be aware of like the 12 month holding capital gains discount where you can get a 50% capital gains discount by holding your assets over the 12 months. So speak to your accountant about that as it's a great way to minimize your tax repayments. The next one is judging your time frames. I was speaking to a member of ours more recently who's in retirement. He's 80 years old, he has over a 1 million DOL crypto portfolio. He's absolutely crushing it. Has about 500 Ethereum and now he's looking to stake his ethereum to earn a wage. So he doesn't need to sell his crypto. Awesome. His time frame is Probably a lot more shorter. And some of the you that may be in your 30s or 40s. So figuring out your time frame is super important to know when you might want to sell your crypto to have a short term and long term strategy. So for me in this next cycle, I've got a short term strategy of how much profits I want to take, but then I've also got a long term strategy when I never want to sell my Bitcoin until I'm, you know, really old, you know, beyond 60, 70 years old. All right, so having that short term or long term strategy is important, important. And understanding that time frame, you might have some impending investments you want to make, or you might have some impending debts that you need to repay. So understanding your timeframes will allow you to manage when you're going to sell your crypto. And if you have a professional around you or if you have a community or if you have some trusted advisors, speak to them. You know, they might be able to help guide you to understand when the right time might to be sell. The first one we're going to look at is price targets and how to actually set the price targets that you want to sell your crypto at. So price targets is the level of that asset that you're going to start to sell your cryptocurrency at. So for example, you might want to wait until Bitcoin reaches US$150,000 and then you're going to start to sell. But how much are you going to sell? For me, I look at selling 50% of my portfolio at that target price. So I've got all my coins listed out. I know the sell target that I'm going to try and hit and then how much percent I'm going to sell at that target. The reason I like this is because it gives you an individual look at each asset price. You're not looking at a total market cap or portfolio size. Each individual coin has its own price target based on where you think you can get to. Some people like to sell smaller percentages at smaller price targets. So for example, you might want to sell 10% of your Bitcoin when it gets to 50,000 and then another 10% when it gets to 75,000, for example. So selling smaller chunks as it goes up is a great way to take profits as the market cycle goes. Because the reality is we're going to get a good indication through our fundamental and on chain analysis as to when the bull market really is going to peak. But this allows you to take profits as we go up. The other one is time frames and looking at the market cycles to understand where we are in the bull market and the four year cycle range. A great chart that we look at here at Collective Shift is the MVRV on chain analytics ratio. It gives us a really good indication of the profits of the people that are currently holding crypto that haven't moved it versus the coins that are moving on exchanges. And this gives us a good indication of when crypto starts to get overbought or oversold sold based on where it is in the cycle. So that's another way we can look at it and you can overlay these two strategies. So as I mentioned at the start we've got a ten step strategic process we take all of our clients through to help them get set up with their strategy. The sell strategy is just one component of that. I'm going to quickly walk you through my five step strategy now to give you a good indication of what this could look like at a simple level. So you can do this at home. So the first step is the planning stage, listing out all my assets and starting to look at the price targets. And those price targets you can look at based on market cap, looking at the competition, looking at where it got to all time highs in previous cycles. But it's important again when you're looking at price targets is to not look at the token price. You've got to look at the market cap. Because a lot of these tokens have inflated their supply, the token price is irrelevant. You need to look at the market cap. So looking at these things gives us a good indication of where that sell target might be. Now you may adjust that price target as we go into a bull market. And I've done that personally in the last cycle where I made life changing amounts of money, I was able to adjust my price target as we went into the bull market. Once we got new data. You can do your best to predict where a token might get to. But the reality is unless you've gotten up to date data in the heat of the moment, you're not going to really know months out. So set a price target. But that may move. Just ensure it's a logical move based on data, not an emotional move when you're thinking it could go higher. What if, and imagine if that makes sense. Number two is thinking about the automation. Where am I going to sell that crypto? Do I have an OTC desk provider set up? If you're selling hundreds of thousands of dollars for crypto, selling that on A spot exchange at 1 or 2% fees is going to cost you a lot of money and that doesn't even include the spreads. So getting yourself up with the right exchange or the right OTC broker can reduce you a heap in your fees and your spreads when you're selling a lot of money. The third one is where are you storing your cryptocurrency? That hardware management and security? Ensuring that you've got that locked up on a cold wallet, away from any warm wallets and on exchanges is a way safer method to store your cryptocurrency. The fourth one is tax considerations and your structure. Do you have your crypto in the right structure? I've got advisors around me that help me manage my structure and ensure that I've got the most tax efficient strategies. Going into this bull market and looking at my tax strategies as well, thinking about that capital gains discount, thinking about holding for longer than 12 months and understanding when you're selling those coins, if you're moving them from coin to coin here in Australia, that is a taxable event. So making sure if you're taking profits in a bull market and you're moving it from one coin to another, that is a taxable event. And I've seen so many people get stung on that. When you sell into another coin and that coin goes down and you need to pay your tax bill at the end of the year, then that coin is going down, you don' have the money to repay the tax bill. So tax strategies is super important as well. And last but not least is execution and psychology. So having it all mapped out, I've literally listed out where I'm moving my assets from example from my cold wallet to Uniswap, into Ethereum, into usdc, into fiat through my OTC provider, I write it all down logically, step by step. So as soon as you come into a bull market, you're not thinking about what to do when you're fumbling around with your ledger trying to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of crypto. The bull market's maniac. Where do I sell it? How do I do it? All of a sudden you made a mistake. All of a sudden you've lost money because you haven't been prepared. And this is the most important thing about having that plan and having that sell strategy is that you've already thought about all of these things. You're just executing and making money and that's going to put you in the 10%. When 90% of people are thinking about what new altcoin they should buy at the peak of the market when Bitcoin's at 150,000, everyone's piling in. You are sophisticated, you know exactly what's going on. You know this is the time to get out and you're just taking profits. And in the next bear market, I guarantee you're going to be the one that's laughing versus all the money that lost through those new investors that came in. Another important part that most people overlook is your personal psychology. Thinking about how you're going to execute your trades and the emotions and the feelings you're going to feel in the bull market. Cryptocurrency is unlike any other market in the world. The amount of money you can make in this market is unbelievable. But unless you know what you're doing, you're going to be overwhelmed by emotion and euphoria and dopamine that you're not going to be able to execute. So managing your psychology is super important. A great way to do this is by having an accountability partner or group. It's one thing that we do really well here at Collective Shift, especially with our platinum members, is keeping each other accountable. We keep each other accountable by holding each other account to their strategy and then knowing when the right time to sell is through research. In this bull market, there's going to be your friends, your family, YouTube videos, people screaming at you about how much money there is to make. But managing your psychology, staying logical and sticking to your plan is super important. It's one of the biggest reasons why I've been able to make money in the past seven years in crypto is through having the team I have around me, keeping each other accountable, right? Even if it's just your friend that's in crypto or having a family member, maybe it's your spouse, your partner. If you were to go to them in a bull market and show them how much money you've made and you haven't sold, I guarantee they're going to tell you to start selling and you're crazy if you haven't. So write down those things, understand how much money that you need, what that life changing amount of money will be, and then know in a bull market you're going to be feeling euphoric, you're going to feel as though you can make more. But remember those times, remember where you are in those times, when have that money and that's going to help you sell. Then it's all about execution. As I mentioned, having that listed out, where are you selling? Are you moving it to A decentralized exchange, Are you moving it to a centralized exchange? How are you getting it from your hardware wallet? You know, is there going to be liquidity problems? In previous bull markets, exchanges had to shut down the ability to sign up new people because there was too many people trying to sign up. You know, do you have multiple exchanges set up, have all of that prepared for you? Do not want to be worrying about that in a bull market. And then it's about writing it all out. And you can write it all out with one of our PDF templates, which we have. You can head over to Collective Shift. If you go to the Research tab under there, there's a crypto strategy document which you can fill out that's going to help you start to document that plan. And for all of our members that come on board, they print that out, they write it out. And then in a bull market, you have that and you can rely on that. And just by doing that, just by thinking about that plan, you're going to be ahead of 90% of the market. So as that common saying goes, if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat. Don't go through this cycle again, running it all the way up and all the way down without taking profits. Having that plan, having that guidelines is going to catapult your ability and your success probability of actually making money in this bull market. And I really want you to win. So write that plan out, execute it. I guarantee you're going to be far greater ahead of all the other retail investors that are not doing the hard work now. I hope that's been helpful. If you have any ideas about new videos or new strategies or things you want me to cover, please let me know in the comments below. Love for you to check out my other videos and I'll see you on the next episode.
