As the date approaches for selling your portfolio shares, stress and anxiety start to build. Your holdings might not be performing exactly as you expected. You’re torn between holding on, opening new positions, or reinvesting – and if you do reinvest, where should you put your money? Investing is never child’s play, especially in the world of crypto, where predicting where BTC, ETH, SOL, etc., will be next month is nearly impossible. Unlike real estate, which tends to be slower to change and predictable, crypto markets can oscillate wildly in a matter of days or even hours.

If the latest market crash, which saw cryptocurrencies shed significant value, has you nervously checking popular pairs like ETH/BTC ten times before bedtime, it might be time to tweak your investing mindset a bit – if only to remain sane. In light of recent developments in the crypto world, here are some strategies you can adopt now to sleep better at night while still positioning yourself for potential long-term gains in key coins.

Analyze long-term charts

What a bliss it is to casually check your crypto portfolio and see it has climbed overnight – an ecstatic moment that might tempt you to invest even more. Unfortunately (and realistically), this isn’t the case. The gains of today can be the losses of tomorrow, and vice versa. Crypto is notoriously volatile, and it’s incredibly easy for wild, unpreventable fluctuations to trigger your anxiety. You can likely recall the moment you see prices spike – rallies that are all over the news – and feel like investing some more is the immediately advantageous thing to do. This is the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) lobbying you. But you don’t act upon your wish because you remember how sorrowful it is when you find out prices are dropping again. In fact, you start to flirt with the idea of selling out and reducing losses as much as you can. This would be the psychological effect of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), testing your perseverance and patience.

To dodge any potential FOMO, FUD, REKT, paper hands, and so on, and to know whether you’re dealing with common sights like pumps, dumps, bagholders, etc., you need to look at the bigger picture. Stop focusing on short-term performances – not hourly, not daily. Start relying on longer timeframes, such as one-year, three-year, six-year views to assess whether your asset is actually increasing in value or just rallying on some momentous headlines that echo more in your mind than in your actual portfolio.

BTC vs. ETH, SOL, XRP, and more

When it comes to BTC, you’ll understand more about the normal macro regimes and trends, as well as how it works by looking at five-year timeframes. You’ll learn how the market’s ruler moves in the long term, even if you’ll see sharp increases or decreases. It better reflects exactly how it interferes with your long-term goals and addresses the noise and drama that are generally present with an unprepared mindset.

For smaller-cap cryptos like ETH, XRP, SOL, BNB, and others, longer timeframes will help you understand movements better, because as you will see, demand doesn’t follow a straight line. It’s fragmented and varies from coin to coin, driven by external factors such as technological advancements or platform upgrades.

Volatility is the baseline, remember

Volatility feels like the biggest personal enemy when it doesn’t work in our favor, which is often the case. But remember that this is the norm in an asset class that thrives on speculation. Big-cap assets like ETH, XRP, and SOL routinely record daily price swings that would be terrific in the most profitable of stocks, if they occurred. It’s normal for large-cap cryptos to rise or fall between 5% and 10% within just a day. Bitcoin, though much steadier, still moves more quickly than most major equities. The bull market of 2021, known to this day as the biggest Bitcoin bull market, saw it fluctuate by 5%-6% daily.  

If you see your portfolio’s value jump or drop this much in just a day, know that it’s normal to feel your stomach churn. But this doesn’t mean losing your sanity over this. Just recalibrate what you understand by “normal”. The key is to convince yourself that plunges of over 5% are normal in big cryptos, so long as they don’t lose an astronomical percentage – say, 25%. Movements like these, while daunting, are part of the very crypto landscape that generates gains for those who wait.

DCA versus lump-sum investing

You check your general crypto price chart and see that your target crypto has gained 12% today. Instinctively, you begin to think about how much an investment in that coin will inflate over the next day, or week, or month – in the first second you don’t even acknowledge the possibility of losses. But as soon as the reality, with all its anxiety and emotional distress, settles in, all these beautiful expectations shift to nervousness. How much would such an investment drop? Because soaring coins trigger a feeling that often feels like fate will make sure to decrease your investment’s value right the day after you buy. And if you finally gather the courage to buy a dipping coin, chances are it will fall even further.

Evidently, there’s no rule that creates these outcomes. It’s just a general overview of how most financial markets work. Most investors try to time their entries and exits perfectly, only to fail and possibly quit the game. But you can avoid such scenarios if you make use of one of the simplest yet greatest solutions designed to help investors remain constant when adjusting their portfolios. It automates purchases, allocating a fixed amount of money to crypto at regular intervals. You can invest on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, no matter the price. In time, you’ll be able to regulate your emotions during big fluctuations and see the true trend of crypto, determining how your investment goes.

Successful investors aren’t those quick to react. It’s those who maintain their calm during the inevitable storms that see their investments finally blossom. Are you patient and calculated enough for crypto?