This week, the US presidential election (November 5) and the FOMC meeting (November 8, with the market expecting a 25-basis-point rate cut) will be important economic events that will drive market sentiment. In the previous article (October 31), we also mentioned that the market may experience new, larger fluctuations in the next two weeks, so it is advisable to stay away from leverage.
Currently, there is not much to say about the market. In this issue, let's do a phased summary and talk simply about the issue of opportunities and opportunities.
So-called opportunities are those that you need to actively strive for, and opportunities can be man-made. Opportunities, on the other hand, are objective, accepted, and not actively created by humans. Opportunities often represent the formation of favorable conditions and environments.
Remember that in 2023, we shared a lot of projects through Talks Outside the Lines. Looking back, that year was indeed a year full of opportunities, and at the time we were also excited about the potential bull market opportunities that might appear in 2024. If someone has been following and reading the historical articles of Talks Outside the Lines, they should have a personal feel for this overall trend change. At the same time, it was during 2023, the most pessimistic segment of this bear market cycle, that we persisted with our BTC DCA plan without interruption until the 20-month DCA plan officially ended in January 2024.
Now we have officially entered November, and there are less than 60 days left until 2025. Over the past year, some people around me have made very impressive gains, but some have also lost a lot of money. But in any case, this year has been a very important one for wealth accumulation in the crypto field.
Over the past two years, I have invested most of my personal spare time and energy into the Talks Outside the Lines self-media, and have invested little effort in trading, mainly maintaining an 80% position in BTC. During this process, although I strictly adhered to my customized DCA plan and basically completed the expected return target, I did indeed miss out on some new opportunities due to my "conservative" approach. For example:
**1. Missed airdrop opportunities**
Although I have received airdrops from some projects in the past, the main ones being ARB and ARKM, I didn't pay much attention to it and just sold most of them right away. For example, with the ARKM project, I received thousands of tokens in several of my wallets, and I sold them at around $0.6 each, while the token later reached a high of nearly $4.
Although it now seems like a lesson for me, I don't feel too much regret. This is mainly related to my personal energy, as being able to get ARB was because I was more optimistic about the development of the Arbitrum ecosystem at the time, and you can find many articles on Arbitrum in the history of Talks Outside the Lines. As for ARKM, I started using it since the internal testing of the project, which is a very useful wallet query and tracking tool, and I have also mentioned this tool in some previous on-chain tool topic series articles.
It is precisely because my personal focus over the past two years has not been on airdrops that I have missed out on some airdrop opportunities. Although I participated in a lot of new project interactions last year, most of them were just at the simple experience level, and I only experienced them 1-2 times, mainly for the purpose of writing articles.
To do well in airdrops and get good results, it requires more time and energy, which I don't have, so I can calmly face and accept this missed opportunity.
**2. Missed MEME coin opportunities**
When I entered 2023, I had sorted out a lot of narratives, and finally identified AI, RWA, and GameFi as the top three narratives to focus on in 2023-2024. But looking back, while AI and RWA seem to have performed well overall, the decline of GameFi has completely exceeded my initial expectations.
In fact, what I didn't expect at the time was the MEME coin narrative. Although I had noticed and witnessed the birth and development of tokens like PEPE and ORDI at an earlier time, I never anticipated that the Bitcoin ecosystem concept and the Solana ecosystem's popularity would directly turn this bull market into the stage for MEME coins.
This also made me have to invest more space in my articles on MEME coin-related things, and I also organized and shared a lot of on-chain tools, memes and runes (BTC ecosystem) related to MEME coins. Because when I write articles, I do consider the current hot spots to some extent, and I don't completely ignore the market or people's focus points and just work in isolation.
It's just that in the case of MEME coins, my energy was more focused on summarizing those successful strategies (such as Smart Money) for the purpose of writing articles, rather than frequently trading myself. So, although a lot of so-called 100x or 1000x stories were born in this cycle, I was not part of those stories.
And according to my personal risk preference and investment strategy, I couldn't have invested too much in MEME coins either. I can only say that I have a little bit of passive gains. For example, sometimes in the process of writing articles, in order to participate in the experience of on-chain tools or processes, I would occasionally use a few tens or hundreds of dollars to participate in some transactions for testing purposes, some of which ended up being zeroed out, and some of which had passive gains. But overall, the MEME coin narrative in this cycle has not brought me much wealth accumulation effect.
I can only say that the MEME coin thing, like the airdrops mentioned above, is something I may have just witnessed and focused on participation.
**3. Security is always the top priority**
Although my articles always put risk management and risk reminders first, giving people the impression that my security awareness is very strong. But from last year to the present, two of the more than ten test wallets I use frequently (the assets in each test wallet are not much, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars) have had their assets stolen, simply because of my carelessness. One wallet was due to accidentally clicking on a phishing link for authorization inside X, and the other wallet was due to being phished when checking emails in my Gmail inbox (my email address is public on the public account and Notion).
In addition to myself, some of my partners have also had similar situations happen, and even some friends in the group have been scammed before, such as one partner who was added as a stranger by someone who was very enthusiastic and guided her to trade, initially making a little money, but eventually being led to a shady exchange and scammed out of nearly a million dollars.
Still, the saying goes, making money is important, but the security of the wallet is the top priority.
**4. Continue to be patient**
In any case, 2023 is over, 2024 is entering the final stretch, and 2025 is full of expectations.
In each cycle, we will experience different four market stages: Accumulation, Uptrend, Distribution, and Downtrend. As shown in the figure below.
That is to say, any financial market has cyclical rules, and the crypto market is no exception. The main logic of market ups and downs is driven by liquidity and investor sentiment (in addition, regulatory changes are also included). With the approaching US election, the Fed's continued rate cuts, and the large-scale adoption of ETFs, we should currently be in a new uptrend.
But sometimes the process can be quite tortuous, whether it's making money or losing money, these are all normal. The key is whether we can analyze our past behavior and combine it with the future trends of the market to position or optimize our strategies.
As for our own work focus in 2025, it will mainly be concentrated in two aspects:
First, we will continue to persist in running this self-media platform, but we will appropriately reduce the update frequency, but we will try to have new thoughts and output every week.
In terms of content, due to some well-known reasons, of the 9 self-media accounts we had previously opened on the domestic network, only 3 accounts have survived so far, and we will no longer consider opening any new platforms on the domestic network next year. On the foreign network, we will focus on using the 3 platforms of Notion, Medium, and Substack for content synchronization. In addition, next year we will continue to focus on outputting content in the form of text and images, and we will not consider opening video-type columns for the time being.
In terms of the mutual assistance group, we will still focus on retaining the only mutual assistance group we have now, which is the most direct communication bridge and bond between "Talk Outside the Box" and the public. After the existing group reaches 500 people, we will no longer consider opening new mutual assistance groups.
In terms of e-books, the plan to release 1-2 new e-book collections every year will remain unchanged.
Second, implement the exit plan.
According to the established goals of 2022, we should be approaching the first profit-taking zone very soon. At the end of this year or the beginning of next year, we will consider implementing the exit strategy, selling off some of our Bitcoin holdings in batches, and making advance plans for the next bear market cycle. As for the altcoins we hold from this cycle, next year we will consider fully clearing them and converting them to Bitcoin at an appropriate time.
Of course, we also have a Plan B. If the price of Bitcoin in this bull market cycle ultimately fails to reach our expected profit-taking zone, we will continue to hold the coins and patiently wait for the next bull market.
In conclusion:
Most people are always striving, hoping to find happiness and joy through their efforts, but perhaps only by truly understanding their inner needs can people truly become transparent.
Many people believe that only enough money can bring them happiness and joy, but in fact, it is often those who can truly be themselves and persist in doing what they love that will have true happiness and joy, and money is just an incidental byproduct of this process.
Many things are not achieved overnight, learn to be friends with time, and maintain investment in the field you focus on; keep finding people or circles that are on the same wavelength as you, maintain positive energy, and continue to maintain a certain patience while continuing to think.
Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ZYNTcxP3qg8jAq2hwuCRwQ
