
What’s bitcoin’s top?
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JP Morgan is my friend, not the bank, but the Victorian banker. He said, “I’ve made a fortune selling too early” and as a bitcoin seller at $32,000 I invoke him as justification. Having said that, and I have stated this tactic in previous columns, I have done at least as well with about half the VAR (value at risk) by playing with the fire that is DeFi.
If you are using decentralized exchanges or keeping tokens or passing them through your wallet, it is often hard to keep track of it all. It is even easy to forget what you have and where. However, there is a great app to keep tags on your ethereum and DeFi positions and it’s called Zerion. It is a tremendous tool for keeping a tally of what you have in the wild game of token trading and it’s free and you can log in using your wallet so there is no painful registration process. I am finding it indispensable.
Meanwhile I am now back in the same position as I was before I sold the bitcoin, of hanging onto my positions by my cuticles with a wildly undiversified and unbalanced portfolio that morphs by the day into a gloriously profitable but unmanageable series of extremely volatile positions. Leaving good investing and/or trading practice at the door is an extremely hazardous approach but it seems unavoidable to capture this rapture.
In a matter of days I’ve gone from “buying all the things” to wanting to flee but that is purely because pretty much all DeFi, credible or otherwise, has gone on a massive vertical that dwarfs the performance of bitcoin and ethereum.
Here is one of my favorites that I hold and you can see why an old school equity guy, a value investor to boot, gets a nose bleed from this kind of price ascent:

One of my favorite DeFi tokesns, matic, has gone vwertical
Credit: ADVFN
Matic, previously called polygon, is not a one-off, it is just a good example. The “why” of it is simple: Matic is a solution to many of the difficulties facing ethereum and its congestion: it is a seasoned project, it is linked to a lot of major players in Silicon Valley by investment, and it has a market cap of about $1 billion, 10% of a Bumble. In the current hepped up investment environment this is chump change and the winners in DeFi will go on to be worth $10-$100 billion, even without the printing press shifting the decimal point with inflation. Chainlink, the leader of the gang, is already nearing a $10 billion valuation. So this is not a ridiculous valuation if you grok that DeFi really is a revolutionary tech that will change everything, it’s just the price performance that makes an old investor’s nerve endings start shorting out.
All that aside, the key question once again is, is the market going up or down?
Bitcoin down, all crypto down; bitcoin up, all crypto up.
To me, I believe these price levels are the upper faces of this mountainous cycle, but many still…