I was lucky enough to get into crypto in 2020, so almost immediately experienced the epic bull run of 2021. I was hooked for life. The downside though is that my portfolio now - despite being much added-to - is still only worth a third of what it was at its height. Measured in fiat terms, at least.

Do you ever look at a particular coin or token you hold, and work out what it would be worth to you if its price returned to its previous all-time high (ATH)?

For example, I have nearly 3,000 PRE as a result of using the search engine Presearch every day. At the moment my PRE holding is worth $156 - not bad for a freebie, especially when I like the product too! But if PRE returns to its all-time high of $0.81 (seen way back in January 2018), my PRE holding would be worth more than $2,300. And that's only a 15x increase - there must be many more extreme examples.

I'm not sure what you would call that metric - 'Value At High' (VAH) perhaps? I'm open to suggestions. As long as it's a three-letter acronym (TLA), I'm happy.

Part of me wants to go through my entire portfolio and calculate the VAH for everything I hold. What coin or token has the highest VAH? And what would my portfolio be worth if everything in it hit a new all-time high at the same time?

That's nonsense, of course - by the time we reach a new bull run, I suspect half the tokens I hold would have fallen away to almost nothing. Many of them already have. Projects die, after all - quick deaths or slow ones.

When not if

And yet... that's what makes all this useful as a thought exercise. I've been saying 'if' a token returns to its all-time high, but wouldn't it be more powerful to be able say 'when'? After all, why hold on to a coin or token if you don't believe in its long-term potential? Yes, you can talk about utility - but if a token has such great utility, that will eventually be reflected in its price. (And granted, you might still trade tokens you don't believe in - I'm talking about longer-term investments here.)

Perhaps the thing to do would be to go through my entire portfolio and ask myself whether I believe each coin or token has the potential to achieve a new all-time high - even in the very long term. If not, I should look to dispose of it.

For example: yes, I'm confident that BTC will return to its previous high of $69,000 - that's only 2.3x the current price. Keep it, of course! But do I really think that BLOK (to take a random example) will manage an 83x recovery? No? Then get rid.

When that exercise is complete, and I have total faith in everything I still hold, then that metric of VAH will have some meaning. It will change from wishful thinking to an expression of the confidence I have in my own portfolio. My own investment strategy. Hell, in the future of crypto. And if we aren't confident in that, what are we even doing here?