BUY AND HODL IS MORE LIKE BUY AND HOPE!
During this drop I have not encouraged anyone to buy nor have I encouraged anyone to sell. I only encouraged the accumulation of solid coins on every major leg down. Again the key here is an accumulation of SOLID coins. These are only coins you’ve heavily researched and want to be in, believing in their future potential 100%.
Why should one be accumulating? Because Cryptos can't be meaningfully analyzed. Unlike stocks, a coins price is solely based on speculation so price prediction and charting are of zero value so any coins bottom is elusive. Since the bottom is unknowable one can’t assume they know when to buy. Accumulating on each leg down always gives you a chance to buy the bottom, develop your position and firm your conviction.
Is it too early to accumulate you may ask? The assessment "too early" asserts that you know the present and requires you know the future. My guess is that you know neither. My answer then - It's never too early to accumulate coins of a good company!
So are we at a bottom? One thing I see could develop is a gradual bottom. This wouldn't encourage shorts to cover, nor longs to buy. Gradual bottoms typically retrace 60-70% from the recent top which would put $BTC around $6500. Too, I’m not certain we’ve had a sufficient amount of negative sentiment to merit a completion to the downside, though many signals are showing we're getting close. In a typical bottom, 99% of the general public will be forced out of the market. This is usually followed by a final capitulation phase and why it's said that most sell at market bottoms.
I see many, the majority, of altcoins, have completed significant full phases from bottom to top to bottom. Some of them are breaking to new lows and most of them look to be headed that way. Weekly charts show the completion of what I call the commodity phase. Thus, coins like $BTC, $LTC, $DASH, various others, look like they've stalled with no clear signal in place.
At the beginning of December traders of all kinds felt that they had to be aboard or miss the move. Now they're jumping off a cliff which is causing an opposite effect. That selling has been going into strong hands, which has so far kept $BTC from breaking down through current support levels with any conviction. At the same time buying the downside on market order has been stronger than previously seen. On February 2nd this contra trend buying had pushed positive flow to a 1 month high. This surreptitious buying is corroborated by net flow of the neutral tick which declines as selling hits a firm bid underneath.
It should be emphasized that price in Crypto markets is swayed by superficial sentiment held by the mass of traders who dominate the action. Even more so, this sentiment affects the price at the margin and induces the non-convicted public to move in its direction. Because of this lemming persuasion effect market price can decline even while strong buying outweighs weak selling, but to those who have conviction about the prospects under what they're buying, the downside price bias provides opportunity.
WHERE IS THE MARKET AT RIGHT NOW?
Where does this leave the market at present? The bigger players are waiting for the other shoe to drop so they aren't playing, that is, waiting for any superficial bad news that the worldwide myth makers can roll into end-of-times, to induce the game players to sell into their own booked orders underneath and to trick the public amateur traders to try to beat the market by selling short or selling out completely. Problem with that approach is no coins have advanced enough to bother selling them.
In the end, you simply have to drown out the noise, and there’s lots of it, and hold onto the coins you truly believe in. Whether that be Bitcoin or any of the other dominant coins, use these opportunities to own more of the coins you truly believe are of real value.
WILL CRYPTOCURRENCY SURVIVE?
I think Gordon Gekko said it best “The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be 'survival of the unfittest’….. Through wars, depressions, inflations and deterioration of paper money, trees have always kept their value. Forests are perishable, forest rights are as important as human rights to this planet, and all the illusory Maginot lines, scorched earth tactics, proxy fights, poison pills, etc….. the bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, as you very well know, is the only way to stay strong is to create value, that's why you buy stock, to have it go up. If there's any other reason, I've never heard it.”