Had a small basket open from April of this year via
@pear_protocol, just think it's interesting to look back at some of these prices and my picks from back then compared to now.
Also think it's a great opportunity to reflect on the year so far. Everyone seems to think I can't miss right now, but I've had tons of big losing trades and whiffs on the year.
1. I made way less money on
$ZEC that I probably should have. It used to be included as a long leg in this basket, but I manually closed it ~breakeven in the low $300 after the infinite mint scare. Despite being pretty early to
$ZEC, it's probably accounted for only a percent or two of my years PNL.
2. Got absolutely smoked by being short
$UNI. Fortunately I did very small size in this account and didn't put the larger shorts on until much higher. Completely underestimated that it's still considered "core DeFi" and is a very name brand blue chip. I still see it as similar to
$COIN; bearish but scary to short boomer/TradFi first entry point to crypto if I'm betting on mass institutional adoption. I feel much comfier shorting at these prices though.
3. Correlated to above, totally whiffed on Robinhood Chain. Quite literally made $0 from
$PONS,
$UP,
$ARB,
$CASHCAT etc. Correctly identified that it'd be bearish my
$SOL longs at the time, but didn't realize how successful it'd be.
4. I don't think I executed around the
$HYPE bottom as well as I could have. I'm much better at trading options now than I am back then, but I think the $28-33
$HYPE was especially a time where my execution/sizing didn't match my views. I was willing to go "all in" there and I was looking at a 500,000x$35/45
$HYPE CS that I didn't pull the trigger on. Still had tons of exposure, but it could have been an absolute BBQ instead of just a solid cook.
5. Actually wished I went much harder on
$LIT. Felt extremely high conviction that $1-2 was cheap, but treated it more like an altcoin pick than a core holding like
$HYPE. Another good example where my sizing didn't match my conviction.
Overall I think occasionally "clearing the board" and reconstructing your portfolio from scratch is a great exercise to really make sure you aren't just sitting in old, stale bags that no longer match your thesis. This account still ended up being up around 50% since April, so not too bad.
I think for a lot of you guys, sizing not matching conviction is the biggest issue. I think one of the best lessons from poker is that the difference between pros and amateurs isn't really how often they win hands (card distribution pretty even for everyone over a large enough sample size), it's how much they win when they get good hands and how little they lose in bad spots. It's all about avoiding blowups and being all in for the really high conviction spots.