Yahoo Finance Crypto Millionaire Confessions: 5 Things I Regret the Most
Many crypto enthusiasts have achieved the status of becoming “crypto millionaires.” In fact, BitBuy reported that there are 88,200 of them across the world, who reached that goal thanks to their investments in digital assets.
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That said, even millionaires make financial mistakes, which can cost them a lot of money.
GOBankingRates spoke to a few of them, who shared what their biggest regrets are.
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1. Being Too Fancy with Tactics
Jayson — a senior executive at a tech marketing firm based in New York who works regularly with crypto and AI ventures, said he has been investing in crypto for nearly a decade.
And while he said he’s made a lot of money, he also made “a lot of dumb decisions.”
“I’ve been buying crypto off and on for roughly seven years now, and just buying and holding has been pretty much the most successful strategy for me,” said Jayson. “Thanks to this rather basic strategy, my crypto holdings of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and smaller bags of memecoins and AI coins are collectively now fluctuating at around $2 million.”
He noted, however, that he does a lot of research on which blockchains and applications have the best tech and most users.
“But whenever I try to get too fancy and trade and make what I think are ‘intelligent’ decisions to sell, well, I lose money,” he said. “Literally, being dumb by buying, closing my eyes and holding through the ups and downs has been the best strategy for me — by far.”
For instance, he bought several thousand dollars’ worth of a new layer-one token in early 2019. His rationale was that the coin’s market cap was low and as it was the first cycle for this token, “it might do pretty well.”
“A month or two later, the market dipped a tad and I started watching all these goofball doomers like Peter Schiff warning about an impending economic implosion, so I paper-handed those tokens,” he said. “The implosion never happened, apart from Covid about a year later, but even that ended up becoming a boon to assets.”
Had he held those tokens and sold them at the peak of the last cycle instead, they would have netted him roughly $1.5 million.
“Thanks a lot, Peter Schiff,” he added.
According to him, the moral of the story in crypto is – don’t try to be too smart. Instead, find some good projects, buy a few of them and then hold and let the cycle play out, he added.
2. Selling Crypto to Buy Stocks
Matt Webb, co-founder at wevr.ai, has been in crypto since 2015, and he said the coin he regrets not holding onto is Chainlink.
During the 2020 crypto bull, he said he “made a lot of money” — specifically during “Defi July” — when he invested in tokens including Compound and Aave, “which made me a lot of profit.”
“The mistake I made was selling a lot of it for a huge profit at the time and thinking it would be a smart idea to buy stocks around October 2020,” he said. “Funnily enough the stocks I bought tanked in 2021. If I had held most of my portfolio until mid-2021/2022 I’d have made way more money! So that was my biggest regret.”
3. Dogecoin
Webb said he also lost $20,000 betting on Dogecoin the day that Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live and touted the coin.
“The Doge community was excited that he might mention it and its price would continue to skyrocket to $1, however, the price crashed as soon as he appeared on SNL and I lost my money,” he said, adding that “it was worth it for the memes.”
4. NFT Madness
One purchase some crypto millionaires also regret are NFTs — or as Shawn Carpenter, Chairman and CEO of StockAlarm, puts it: “When digital dreams turn to dust.”
Carpenter, who said that owning “those digital gems that were all the rage,” felt like having a special part of digital art history — until it did not.
“Imagine this: you purchase what seems to be an exclusive digital artwork, but then discover it’s more similar to a common digital sticker that many others also own,” he said.
5. Memecoins
Along the same lines, Carpenter said that memecoins — which began as jokes on the internet — were funny until money got involved.
“Big money,” he said, citing Dogecoin, as an example.
“Suddenly, everyone started to talk about it. But here’s the funny part: while some people made lots of money, many others bought in thinking their coin would shoot up to the moon, only to see it fall back down,” he said. “It’s like choosing the funniest horse in a race without seeing if it can even run.”
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Crypto Millionaire Confessions: 5 Things I Regret the Most
