I’ve long felt that the most dangerous thing a person can do when it comes to investing is to spend a medium amount of time doing it. I visualized my thoughts in this expertly drawn chart:
It’s counter-intuitive but I genuinely believe that if you want to have better returns, you should dedicate less time to the pursuit of them.
(just humour me with the chart, I know it’s not perfect and should go into the negatives but let’s just assume that the person here is a profitable investor — I have that much faith in you, dear reader)
As you can see, you obviously need to spend some amount of time on investing. This is how you do research, find good investments, build conviction, and monitor your positions. But the value of your time spent pretty quickly hits a plateau and then starts to go down (we’ll address the spike at the end in a bit).
Most people wish they had more time to devote to crypto — more time to research, more time to hunt for alpha, more time to be online at the right time for the next big memecoin win, and so on. The reality is that more time is just more time to make mistakes. More opportunities to buy something out of desperation, boredom, or just good ole FOMO. The more time you spend, the more likely you are to feel obligated to do something.
Very rare is the person who can spend eight hours a day glued to their screen, looking at crypto twitter, charts, prices, discord servers, chats, etc — and not click that buy button.
That’s because people — especially when starting out — are looking for a reason to buy things. You want to find a “hidden gem”. You want to buy something that is going to quickly 2x, or 3x, or 10x. Greed takes hold. Even if you think you are being logical and rational by doing research, your subconscious mind is hoping, wishing, praying that you find some justification for buying something.
And inevitably, you will find something to buy. There’s an infinite amount of coins out there, and there are a near infinite amount of humans willing to sell you a reason to buy each one of those coins. The issue is that the thing you’re buying is probably not a good thing to be buying, and you’re probably buying it for the wrong reasons.
Now back to the spike at the end…