Freedom is:

Selling your old HODL bags.

The year is 2017. I have heard about Bitcoin once in 2010. Again in 2012, Again in 2015. I talked with family about crypto Summer 2017 into the end of the year. I was given some paper Litecoin in 2017, Christmas, and that night, I had a dream. December 26th, 2017, 27th, 28th... I had an eerie, constant nagging in mind, body, spirit, that I needed to learn about this as an asset class.

For many years, I had an interest in investing. Every once in a while, I would see one of those late night commercials talking about these special stock-trading software programs that told you exactly when to buy and when to sell. I would watch, and sometimes think to myself "Hmm, visually, this is very similar to my audio software work... I wonder if I'd be any good at it?" I would ponder, every once in a while, about the idea of skimming tiny safe profits off the top of stocks by using one of these programs to watch the waves of value going up and down.

After a few weeks of reading about the coins, the history, watching Bitcoin videos, separating out the hype from things that are actually beneficial to understand, I realized that there was an apparent opportunity with very high risk asset class, but a potential for an even higher top. This was very rare in any other market, and very hard to choose correctly in traditional penny stocks and breakout investments. This could be a real, legit one-time opportunity.

Now, to give a tiny bit of background, Gordon has a history of being a deep-dive researcher. I'm not your average info-dumpster-diver. So, if I get interested in something, I want to go from 0-encyclopedic in as few seconds as possible. In addition, I develop software for the professional audio world. Famous Producers, Mixing Engineers and Recording Artists use my stuff to sound kewl. Half-Life-Audio-Super-Hero? Perhaps. This matters because I do the hard work myself, analyzing waveforms, editing from visualization curves, and someday when I cross the $10M profit line, I will make a video showing the insane correlations that helped me learn to trade by instinct just as much by indicator.

I skimmed off of the top of my software sales to put $20 here, $30 there into crypto to test trading. I learned how the fractions of value got eaten in fees, made it impossible to gauge profit and withdraw earnings with too small of a stack. But, something interesting was developing; I wasn't guessing anything wrong.

Every day, I tried paper trading and then testing it on Binance, and I went from a handful of trades, to dozens, and I still wasn't guessing anything wrong.

I started next-level research, now that I understood the basics of the market, and watched every video about trading that existed. I learned about strategies in setting stop-loss, watching candles, using MACD to understand emotion and averaged time waves of response and sentiment. I learned how bad advice some amateur "experts" gave, and I learned about the gambling odds people used to develop trading formulas. I tried applying all of these things. But, there was an anomaly; I wasn't guessing anything wrong.

So, the first real blessing to this, was that I was building a tiny profit, which made it possible for me to get out of the single-digit-sats profit and analyze the fees to see where they come out, how much they impact growth, and I started to do projections. Here's the important part; because I had so very little to trade with, I was focused on the practicality of getting into large enough digits to simply study rate of growth. No one was really teaching about the impact on performance and fees, because I believe to this day, everyone was just teaching what they learned from somebody else. Later down the road, I would contact famous top-earner Youtube personalities to show my stats and ask them about specific indicator positions, and if these could be quantified to improve accuracy? They all were very, very, very interested to learn what I was doing right, but not a single one of them offered advice in return as to how to better read the indicators I understood. They didn't know jack that I wasn't already applying better than them. But, their gig was working, and I was just learning. 

The BIG, BIG blessing? Because I had so little to work with, my analysis gave me an understanding of the effect of compound earnings that I would not have come to understand any other way. I had peaked at doing a few dozen accurate trades every day, now a little obsessed which is what it takes for me to get really good at something. I keep going tirelessly until something breaks so I can learn how to fix it. Even though I was trading steadily, now testing different profit ranges and how often they can be repeated reliably, my profits were growing at a faster rate. This was because of the practicality of compound growth. Wait, I remembered this from somewhere...

7 years of research in future technologies taught me some very important rules in quantum engineering and physics. Once again, legs in two industries was a huge leap for me in trading cryptocurrencies. Growth curves in quantum efficiencies and engineering led to the transistor, which is the heartbeat of growth in the hifi audio world, and also in the computer world aka Silicon Valley. Without breakthroughs in science in the 30's through to the 60's, none of us would be discussing the freedoms afforded us. There's a really cool thing called Moore's Law:

https://www.britannica.com/technology/Moores-law

I was experiencing a teeny tiny piece of a mathematical phenomenon that I now refer to as my personal, exponential growth curve. You can chart these yourself.

Small initial micro-changes to a trading strategy can lead to massive waves of growth later on. Pinching fractions of pennies in the first hundreds of tiny micro-profits could lend the leverage needed to double the rate of increase at a fairly predictable pace, if you remain accurate.

I was so excited, but I was doubtful at every turn. Every professional trader is talking about using stop loss with risk versus reward, so that essentially, indicators are there to guarantee 54-57% accuracy. When you win, you keep big leveraged profit. When you lose, you lose less than when you win. So, unless you have a terrible run for a long time and do not know how to read a single asset correctly, you always have this 1-5% margin of growth. Do this correctly with a huge wad of cash and 10X leverage, and you can do this for a living, put away a tiny nest egg, and live off of your trade profits. But, then why was everyone with this strategy teaching it in courses and doing YouTube videos?

Back to the music industry for a second. I was in a serious recording band with distribution and a radio promoter team decades ago. I learned from painful direct experience, that the only people guaranteed to make money in the music industry were label execs and independent promoters. There is always going to be an artist desperate for attention or a chance for fame to pay out the nose for someone with connections to make phone calls for them. In stocks and crypto, there is more steady money to be made teaching, than actual trading. If you happen to still actually trade decently, then that can help too. But, these guys with training courses and YouTube channels were burning out from the stress of trading and skimming profits.

I hit a few bouts of depression in the rollercoaster of immeasurable stress, but near-perfect accuracy. At 0.2% profit, 0.5%, 1.0%, 2-5%, I was guessing 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, 1 HR candles correctly. I started programming this into strategies in free CryptoHopper accounts and got even better. Eventually I started paying to use it. I used it manually, to make limit sell orders kick in quickly, meaning that I didn't have to calculate the margin for profit and it would happen very quickly.

I was trading 39-79 trades/day without any auto-bot buys, and now I was getting green-range signals inside the program and limit sell orders went in quickly. Now, I would REALLY have data on when I was going to start getting worse at this.

Something worth mentioning, is that there are hundreds if not thousands of people who use things like CryptoHopper to do even hundreds of trades in a day, and they all have a lot more money than me. I believe the distinction here, is that the only losses were happening when there was a glitch in the software, or one time I fell asleep. Ugh. So, without bragging, the point is that doing dozens, and hundreds of trades is significant when you still aren't factoring in how many losses are weighing against you. It isn't unusual for someone to be making 10-40% gains per day, but it is nearly impossible without factoring in 9-32% losses, meaning it is very hard to consistently earn 1-10% profit, PROFIT, every day. Buffet does, what, 25% profit/year? Trust me, he'd do a lot more if he had people to figure it out.

Into 2018, I guessed wrong at 11 trades, and finished around 2500 trades at profit. Now, I had to learn how to adjust for HODL's, because I not only needed to know how to guess at my growth, but the accuracy of those trades I guessed wrong. I found that if I was able to keep an 80% accuracy on trades that did not clear quickly, then I would still remain in profit, and even if those HODL's went into incredibly bad nosedives, they would even out through a strategy similar to dollar cost averaging, but doing calculated sell-offs on losses.

2018 became a big lesson in dishonesty from certain crypto projects, what an exchange system glitch could do to one's strategy, and how to adjust to those nosedives. Throughout 2018 and into 2019, the strategy was to trade alts against Bitcoin. Regardless of its value, whether $2900 or $500,000, eventually we would want more in profit in Bitcoin than we would in dollars, and converting that over to fiat to cash out would yield more when the time was right. The risk was enormous, because an ounce of legislation, a break in a blockchain, a massive fraud or hack, and it could all disappear. But, for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to me it was only worth doing if we were going to do it right. When I say "we", it was now a project for myself and a couple of family members and one business associate now close friend.

Trading excruciatingly long hours on a down-turn was a different animal from some of the 2017-into-18 boom, but I adjusted well, and the plan kept working. I continued to develop a system for the process that was working, so we could learn to measure rate of growth and track our numbers.

From 2018 into the worst drops in 2019, we worked to resolve the one problem with exponential growth based on reducing risk that seemed the real challenge to overcome. See, at this point I did not care whether the system was perfect, and to this day I still don't care. We only have to get this right one time, and we can essentially continue for laughs and giggles if we want to. But, if the size of trades is growing and thus determining the rate of profit growth, the risk is much higher for each trade. For someone who was used to working with hundreds of dollars, at one point we were now looking at 1-2 Bitcoin-sized trades. No one could tell me what happens if you guess wrong, one time, and the worst things happen with that asset? You're trading against Bitcoin, which is king. Dominance was going up while alts were going down. At the end of that run, when things were getting quite bad, I guessed 28 wrong trades out of 13,000. But, I held 3.7 Bitcoin worth of bags that were sitting at 0.2 BTC value. It was soul-crushing. We had, at worst, 98% loss. So, the entire process was quickly becoming about re-routing strategies to break even on principle, while still measuring accuracy and growth. Exponential growth was now about survival and narrowing the gap.

Someone is going to read this, or half-read this, and comment "why didn't you use stop-loss, dummy?" I actually created my own strategy to create a profit reserve specifically just for bailing out bad trades. But remember, there were only 28 total. I tried using it when I panicked over something dropping heavy, and I lost $hundreds, and I ended up being right to begin with. So, using a stop loss would have been the wrong thing to do 98.7% of the time, literally. It's a lot harder to find fundamental math to support a high level of accuracy than to create a risk/reward based on educated guesswork.

Every time there was an opportunity to gain back some of that extreme loss, I did so, and each time it paid off. The exponential gains were earning very small, but at a much higher rate than the weight against profit from those losses. Breaking even was a very depressing thought for someone working so hard at this with so much accuracy, but I realized it was not about that. The only thing that mattered was reducing risk and trading accurately. 

Let me take a second to talk about that accuracy as well, because some people play stupid games to pump themselves up and trick people into buying their programs or investment pools based on 80% accuracy and crazy numbers we all know are bull(market)crap. I don't brag or have an interest in convincing you of my abilities. I am telling you my story. I am older, wiser, and much further behind on rest than any human should be. Let's just say between several family emergencies, hospital stays, recoveries, friend and family deaths in this window of time, I was MUCH better prepared for 2020 than the rest of you- lol. 

Back to the story. The last adjustment that I made, which was difficult to choose to do, was to adjust everything towards reducing risk and reducing profits down to a very unimpressive margin. If I could phase out the number of HODL's, I could grow steadily in smaller bites, and my method would likely work in an up, down, sideways, fast and slow market. I was right.

Now, this winning strategy is where we go into the start of 2020 getting ripped off on 3 different exchanges. A 100% accuracy on 7 different exchanges, some of which I still respect and love. I can't trade on Binance bc U.S. regulation sucks, and Binance.US is one of the few things that sucks worse- lol. But also, they have no interest in actually adding all 50 states. Around May, I earned off of all exchanges that were HODL's at 100% profit and added to the primary strategy, trading everything to USD(t). I got old HODL bags that were guaranteed to be losses down to 2 last coins; IOST and GO. I do not care when they pump big again. I truly don't. I got 1/3 back, out of a 98% loss, and have earned bigger and faster from an adjusted exponential growth on everything else we have done correctly, and now have more I ever could have prayed to get back from those evil old bags.

Here's the blessing;

Because we were trading Bitcoin pairs all that time, even though the sats were dropping in IOST and GO, once I sold, they synced with Bitcoin for 20 minutes here, 1 hour there, making the actual USD value of the bags much higher than what Bitcoin was worth when I bought them. So, a massive 1 Bitcoin trade in 2018 was maybe worth $6K. If I did it right, sold, and held, yeah today it would have been a $40,000 Bitcoin. Ouch. But, we're talking about the one loss I was concerned about. So, it is about how much I was going to lose, not what the imaginary value would have been had I guessed right. So, Getting anything more than $2-3K back from those painful drops would be a God-send at this point. I don't talk $ usually, so let's just say that we got a lot more back than I could have expected, and now that 100% accuracy on all new trades got a big boost.

2021, please just don't break the financial world. Regulators, please be greedy enough to protect banker, investor and institutional funds so we can get a free ride for at least 2 more years.

I swear, if old-school OG HODL'ers finally do decide to start cashing out the top and they get screwed, I will be so mad, on their behalf. I know life isn't fair, but the world needs some idealists with Buffet-sized earnings. 

So, I commemorate a wonderful feeling in the midst of some of the politically crappiest crap I've ever lived through. A silver lining on all of this, is the hope of a chance at true exponential growth once and for all. I pray that there are no more twists and turns in this story. It seems impossible for that to be the case, but Gordon feels he has paid his dues left, right, up and down. A little chance to earn a little safety cushion and do some massive good for fellow humanity sure would be a great thing!

For now, Gordon Freeman the free man, wishes you blessings upon all of your HODL bags. And for now, I am out.