Adventures in Crypto – The Climb #706

Thursday 28^th January 2021

I’m feeling really rundown this week. There’s part of me that wants to be motivated and organised, and yet there’s another part of me that is now bored of this pandemic and how the days seem to bleed into one another. I’m frustrated that I started this month so productively, and then the news cycle dragged me (and seemingly others around me) down to the point I’m reaching the end of the month not achieving much. It’s all plans and no action.

However today was a little different and I’m thankful for that.

I’ve been following the news about Wallstreetbets and Gamestop the last couple of days. Of course, the news is now reaching the mainstream and everyone thinks they can make a quick buck. That ship has long sailed. As I said to someone online: If it’s reached the news, the opportunity has since long gone.

I think I might have been an early WallStreetBets subscriber on Reddit. Only recently did I unsubscribe when it was cluttering up my Pokemon Go feed, so I’m not sure if it was that particular subreddit.

It got me thinking of why I had initially subscribed and it was due to the last big “people are making money quick” news item which was during the Bitcoin bubble a few years back. I’d bought myself about £15 worth at the time: not because I was planning to make money – that ship had sailed by the time I heard about it – but really to dip my toe into crypto. It was quite complicated to buy bitcoin back then and the exercise was mostly trying to figure out how to do it.

I’d left it there with a view to dabbling with it in the future. But seeing the news made me think of this and wanting to check my balance. It’s more that tripled in 3 years which shocked me a bit. Why had I not invested more at the time? (Answer: because I could have equally as easily of lost it).

I’d tuned into a few Youtube livestreams on the market and saw that people were already trying to find other stocks in which to try and emulate those early Gamestop investors. And I saw that after an Elon Musk tweet, people were all talking about Dogecoin.

This is really a meme crypto but the price was low and it did seem to fit with the general air of those Gamestop investors. I saw people shouting AMC, Gamestop and Doge in the comments.

Now I know nothing about finance. But I reckoned that whilst Gamestop and AMC were more about artificially inflating the price to combat the Hedge Fund shorters, Doge was more about promotion. I can’t really explain it, but I felt that if Musk had tweeted about it and people were buzzing about it, that people would invest.

So I bought a whole £20 of it! Yeah, I know. Go me!

The thing is, it did massively rise in price. I’m at least 500% up and it could go to 1000%. Of course, once the shorts get called on Friday, everything will quieten down and I suspect the price will drop, but even I made £5 I’d be quite pleased with myself.

I’ve been saying all pandemic that people don’t understand risk. And maybe it’s something I’m good at, because I made a good call. I have no intention of becoming a day trader, but my plan is that I may take my winnings when I cash out into Bitcoin and use that as seed money to build from. The idea of building from nothing appeals to me and will stop me being like some of these investors and effectively pumping their savings into propping up little more than a gambling habit.

If I lose it all… well, I’m only £20 down, and by keeping it as bitcoin, I guess that – in my head – I can rationalise it as not being money which will keep this feeling more as a strategy game like goldmaking in Warcraft than succumb to greed. It’s something I can dip into and out of as well.

In a week where I’m feeling completely in a rut, it really helped break the pandemic cycle a bit for me. I doubt it’ll ever make me a millionaire, and my profit is going to pay for little more than a takeaway meal, but at least I feel I’ve achieved something today.