Good morning/evening

Well if we are in a bear market, then this is the time to plan, research and buy low any projects token/coin that you think have potential in the next bull. I am not doing that, because I don't plan on buying any! Well nothing apart from Bitcoin and as you may know from a previous post, I already have started DCA'ing in.

OK let me start with this, I love crypto and i'm not disilusioned in that respect, but for me, the last cycle was a test and I researched and tested a lot, the amount of hours put in to that was immense but worth it to some extent, the plan was to find out what would be good for me, even down to trading and what type of trading suits me and how much time I want to spend doing it.

What I looked at and how did it go

L1s

Solana

It would have gone better if I had followed the plan and not the hype, but I still believe that Solana is the better chain, huge usage and TVL but not always reflected in price action. Although I did sell a little, I do still have a bag of SOL so will probably not need to buy more.

Ethereum (I did not buy any, but my son did, so I had to monitor it!)

ALTs

Stacks STX 

I thought the use case for Stacks was great and the STX I have is earning Bitcoin so although I will not add to it I am quite happy to leave it to do it's thing.

ALT layer

This one was my 'sure thing' and I had such high hopes that when it doubled, I did not sell and what was my rule? When it doubles, take out my initial and let the rest ride. Did I do that? No and there were two opportunities to do so, then I watched it go to zero....Well almost!

Optimism OP

This was my Pub0x token and I used Aave to borrow to buy some more, let it double and took profits. Followed the plan here and it worked.

Celestia

I have talked about this in many articles, I had it staked, received no airdrops from it and sold at a loss!

Microcaps

I had a mixed bag covering gaming, RWAs and AI agents and the rule was the same as above and to be fair some were great and I made more than expected and some were just plain bad, but although overall I did make profits, I still have some of these micros lurking around in various wallets that I did not sell. I made more than I lost but the risk vs reward is too high. Plus all the research took a lot of time.

Memes

Drinking wine and picking meme coins does not work lol, I must admit I made more money shorting Memes than I did from buying them as I was often too slow to sell, but it was only veyr small punts on these so no loss really. It is not my thing so don't plan on buying any.

DeFi

Kamino and Aave have both been really good and I will use them again, Aave was mainly used to borrow to buy and timing was key here, either through luck or judgement I got it right, Kamino was mainly LPs and some staking which also went well and I will continue to use both.

Airdrop hunting

Some people do really well at this, I am not one of them, take Berachain for instance, I spent a year doing everything on the test net, buy, sell, get an NFT, stake and trade and had surpassed the criteria that was thrown around for receiving an airdrop and what did I get? A big fat nothing! there were a few others I also tried to no avail so I don't plan on wasting my time on that any more. 

DePin

Helium (I have miners)

Natix

WXM (I have a miner)

Use case is the word most people use when talking about DePin and yes it does sound plausible but it does not matter how much data you gather, if nobody wants to buy that data it is useless. All my income from Helium now goes to my son and I use the term lightly as in 1 month my miners have earned 2.12 HNT or at current price at time of writing $2.55 bless him, but they do say every little helps. As for WXM, I sold tokens regularly starting at $1 and made my ROI and now it is a 1 to 2 cent token and probably not worth the electricity to keep it turned on. Natix was a free app and I made a little bit with it, probably was worth $20 or so now about$1.50 and have not used it in a long time.

Oracles

Everyone needs an oracle, so yes I had some Chainlink and yes it did move a bit but not quite what I expected and not really sure that I will buy this time around. I also have some of The Graph, honestly I don't even remember where it came from and I was waiting for ALT season to sell it.......We all know what happened there!

Trading

I enjoy a bit of trading, although still learning and finding my groove and I even tried some liquidation level trading, TA is as complicated as you want it to be but all I will say is that many people had models and indicators that you could pay for and some that were free and they all failed, I think Coinglass had over 20 indicators for a bull market top and none triggered! 

I have a new rule here though, don't trade what you hold so no trading Bitcoin or Solana for me, purely down to the fact that my conviction that these are both great assets makes me overly emotional/bullish too trade them well. Unless I turn into a robot, it is really hard to shut off emotions and emotional trading is not great lol.

To conclude

I still think crypto is great, the tech is great and there can be real opportunities in this space, but for me Bitcoin is easy, buy low, sell high and DCA in at what you think is the bottom. Some will say we had no bull run but I was buying Bitcoin around 20K and although I did not sell the absolute top 20K to 100K is not a bad return! I am not here for a Lambo, hell the road I live on does not even have tarmac but if I can have a return on my investment that helps with some of the fun things in life then I am happy. So for me I will keep investing in Bitcoin and may invest in a few stocks but I do not feel the need to buy ALT coins. What are your thoughts? Are there any ALTs that you want for the next cycle? Do you think microcaps still have potential? With thousands to choose from it is not so easy now!