Hello folks, as the usual, none of this is financial advice and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Please do your own research and find what investments might be best for you. 

We're in a Bear Market Right? 

I'm not a technical analysis guy--not that I don't believe in it, but because I've never really taken the time to understand it. I do follow a lot of people who are TA-guys and the consensus that I've been hearing over and over again is that we're definitely in a bear market, and that the bear market could last for the next few months, if not for the next several. Probably one of the best indicators for the bear market that I've heard is that you'll continue to see the market dump regardless if there's bullish news, and that's been happening like crazy. Regardless, the point of this article isn't to debate about how bearish or bullish the market is, but it's to highlight some of the strategies that I'll be running given the fact that we might be bear for quite some time. 

Strategy 1. Focus on Accumulating your altcoins

If you're like me, you've probably taken significant losses on so-called bluechip alts ($SOL, $AVAX) or even other ones that showed immense promise like $NEAR or $RUNE. Given that the prices for all of these have completely tanked, you may be still holding your now super-low-priced coins not wanting to sell because you simply don't want to realize your loss(es). If you're hodling and you're not planning to do anything with them until the price recovers, it would make sense to make these tokens work for you while you're waiting, whether through single-sided staking (so that you don't have impermanent loss) or joining validators. Although they're site isn't necessarily the most up to date, wherever you're staking, I routinely compare it against whatever  stakingrewards.com lists to see if I'm getting the best expected returns.

Strategy 2. Shorting altcoins that are pumping way too much

This one is quite straight forward, but it isn't without more risks. Essentially if something is pumping really hard when the rest of the market (especially BTC/ETH) is staying relatively flat or dropping down, then I'd be really skeptical about how long-term that pump is going to be. Take recent price action for $FTM from the past week for example:

$FTM over the course of a week went from a little over $0.25 to $0.50 in just a few days, and now it's sitting back at around $0.35. For reference, during this same period of time, the price action on BTC was relatively flat:

Therefore by looking at $FTM pump, you could deduce that the reason why $FTM was pumping was unrelated to the overall market sentiment, and if you're assuming that the overall market sentiment is extremely bearish, it would make sense that what goes up...must eventually come back down. 

Strategy 3. Stacking cash/stablecoins

If we're in a long-term bear market, we've most likely not seen the bottoms yet. Now I think even the best traders will agree that it's impossible to time the market and you can get rekt trying to catch falling knives, but the general consensus that I've read everywhere is that it's pretty wise to make sure you have the the cash on-hand to make sure you can buy whatever dips that may come. Personally, instead of actual USD, I'm trying to hold as much as possible into stablecoins, as risky as they might be. And with stablecoins, my goal is to try to earn more APY on my stablecoins than I would be losing to the current inflation rate, otherwise for me it just isn't simply worth the risk and I'd rather just stick to fiat. The top places I'm looking at? 

Zunami Protocol  (Current 13.41% APY on USDT/USDC/DAI) Zunami is a relatively new protocol that allows you to gain leveraged yield on your deposits of either USDT, USDC, or DAI. Now even though it's been audited and has at times given rates up to around 40% APY in the past, I'm not fully sold yet on Zunami, simply because they haven't been around very long and also because they use USDN as one of their strategies. I personally don't know a whole lot about USDN other than that it's an algorithmic stablecoin, and after the whole Terra Fiasco, I'm a little wary of algo stablecoins. What is cool though is that they have linked etherscan pages to their executed strategies on their protocol website. And once again, only two months old, they haven't passed my longevity test, and the variable rates could continue to drop as they have been over the past week. 

Midas Investments (Current 14.5% APY on USDT/USDC/BUSD/DAI)If you've followed with any of my previous posts on Midas, you probably already know that I'm a big fan for a few reasons--they consistently have some of the best rates available for any centralized platform, and they've been at it for more than 4 years (which is forever-and-a-half in crypto years). I would say the biggest drawback with Midas is that unlike Zunmai, they're not as transparent with their strategies. To their credit however, they've said now in multiple AMAs that it's difficult to be transparent about strategies when they constantly have to readjust to market conditions and changes in risk levels. These changes in strategies are also reflected with some of their recent rate reductions, going from 20% APY down to now 14.5% (To note, if you want to accrue interest in the Midas Token, the interest rates on stablecoins are currently at 17.6%.)

Are there other great places to park your stablecoins? Sure. But I'd argue that many of these places either don't pay out in native stablecoins or they don't auto-compound, which ultimately either leaves you with a non-native token that's depreciating rapidly (see $PTP) or requires a lot more work manually re-compounding. 

Strategy 4. Range Trading BTC

Now this also comes with a pretty significant degree as risk, but if it's true that we might see a long period of crabbing, then for me it makes sense to continue to buy low and sell high with whatever the given range is. Once again if you take a look at the recent price action for BTC, it's been hovering around the 29k to 30k range for quite some time now:

Therefore I've been putting a series of limit orders to buy into BTC whenever it hits 29k, and then I've been selling off whenever it hits 30k. You theoretically could do this with any token that's crabbing like crazy, but with BTC, if it does eventually break downwards to the 25k range (which it very well might), I personally won't mind too much if I missed the low by 14%, considering that I believe that in the long term, BTC will eventually reach ATH's again. Conversely, if I miss out on the ATH's because I sold at 30k, well...my biggest complaint here will be that I took profits too early.

Conclusion

Look, the bear market flat out sucks, and in many stretches of time they're flat out boring. I also have a pretty strong conviction that we haven't seen the bottom of the bear market yet, but in the mean time I've been researching and grinding out different ways to potentially capitalize on essentially how much it sucks, and I hope that everyone else out there is too.

Are there any strategies that you've come up with that aren't mentioned here? If so, I'd love to hear about them. And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this article, and please be sure to follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptosWith