Tuga's territory is not the whole garden. It's about two-thirds of it, plus the wall, minus the far corner where the neighbour's tom holds an opinion. She patrols what she can hold. She has never attempted to claim the entire street, and she has also never surrendered the sunny patch by the shed.
The boundary is not ambition. It's capacity — how much she can actually defend on a bad day, when she's tired and the tom is in a mood.
The question "how much bitcoin should I own?" is the same question, and it has the same answer: as much as you can hold on the worst day, not as much as you want on the best one.
1. Conviction Is the Worst Possible Input
The instinctive method is to size by belief. Strong thesis, large position. It feels rigorous. It's the most reliable way people get hurt.
Conviction is measured while calm, and positions are tested while frightened. Everyone's certainty is high on a Sunday afternoon with the chart going up. What matters is the certainty available at month fourteen of a drawdown, when your position is down 70%, a family member asks about it at dinner, and you have a genuine expense arriving.
That version of you is the one who decides whether the position survives. Size for him.
2. The Only Test That Works
Here it is, and it's not a formula:
Take your intended position. Assume it falls 80% and stays there for two years. Now check whether anything in your life changes.
Not whether you'd be upset — you would be. Whether anything changes: your rent, your sleep, your relationship, your ability to leave a job, your willingness to keep buying.
If nothing structural changes, the size is right. If something does, the position is too big, and the good news is that you've discovered it now, while adjusting costs you a fee instead of a capitulation.
I know of no better sizing tool, and every quantitative framework I've seen is a more elaborate way of asking the same question.
3. What Comes First
Before any of this: an emergency fund that isn't in bitcoin. Several months of expenses, in currency, boring, accessible.
This isn't conservative garnish. It's the thing that makes the position survivable, because it removes the scenario where a bad month in your life forces a sale at a bad price. Almost every "I sold at the bottom" story has a broken boiler or a lost contract in it, not a change of mind about Bitcoin.
An emergency fund is not a rival to your position. It's the equipment that lets you hold it.
4. The Honest Bit About Percentages
You will see numbers thrown around — 1%, 5%, "everything you can". Treat all of them with suspicion, including from people who are right about other things.
The correct percentage depends on your age, your income stability, your other assets, your dependents, your temperament, and what your alternative uses of the money are. Someone with a secure salary, no dependents and thirty years of horizon is in a different situation from someone self-employed with two children and a mortgage. There is no shared answer, and anyone offering one hasn't asked you anything.
What I'll offer instead is the shape:
- Enough that a large move matters to you — otherwise you'll pay attention to it emotionally without benefiting from it materially, which is the worst of both.
- Small enough that a catastrophic move changes nothing structural.
- Between those two, wherever you can be honest about sleeping.
5. Adding, Trimming, and Doing Nothing
Three practices, with honest verdicts:
- Buying on a schedule, forever. The strongest default for most people. It sizes gradually, removes timing, and lets the position grow with your income rather than with your excitement.
- Rebalancing back to a target. Sells strength, buys weakness, controls concentration. Also caps your upside in the asset you presumably own for its upside. Reasonable people do both; just decide in advance which you are, because deciding mid-move is deciding emotionally.
- Taking something off after a large run. Unfashionable in this community and worth saying anyway: converting some gains into a paid-off debt, a cushion, or something you actually wanted is not a betrayal of anything. Money that never becomes a life is just a number you were once responsible for.
6. The Thing That Sizing Buys You
A well-sized position is not primarily about returns. It's about not having to think about it.
Correct sizing is what lets you go a month without checking, ignore the loudest week of the cycle, and keep buying during the quiet years. Every behaviour that actually produces good outcomes over a decade is downstream of a position small enough to be boring.
Oversized positions don't usually lose money by falling. They lose money by making you act.
The Point
Tuga's two-thirds is not modesty and it is not fear. It's an accurate assessment of what she can patrol on a day when she isn't at her best — which is most days, because most days are ordinary and the tom is unpredictable.
Claim the part of the garden you can hold in bad weather. It's a smaller share than your ambition suggests and a larger share than your fear does, and the whole skill is being honest about which of the two is currently talking.
Size it so the worst year changes nothing but the number. 🐾⚡
Nothing here is financial advice — I feed a cat and write about Bitcoin, which qualifies me to advise you on neither. Your situation is not mine. Do your own research, and consider talking to someone qualified where you live.
