The Art of Missing The Pump
What happens if you miss a 1000x in a week
One of the side effects of being involved in crypto is that you narrowly miss insane (100x - 1000x+) returns quite regularly.
I don’t think the human brain is prepared for you to miss insane returns this quickly and regularly. You don’t have to buy Apple stock in the 1983 and then wait 40 years for it to 2000x from $0.08 to $160 per share.
You just have to miss an NFT mint and then watch people who spent $50 become multi millionaires, retire, buy their mom a house, buy expensive cars and travel around the world in private jets. All in the same month.
One example recently is that of Checks by VV which is Jack Butcher’s brand.
I have been following Jack Butcher since 2020 and he was the first person who I heard talk about Bored Apes back when it was $300. I didn’t invest because I was poor and didn’t get why people would buy cartoon monkey pictures for some club membership for hundreds of dollars. Of course, these monkey pictures and its subsequent airdrops and tokens became worth millions of dollars. I think the last number I saw was at least above $2 million.
I don’t really regret not buying Bored Apes at $300 because I only knew how to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum on Coinbase and knew nothing else.
I later saw them at $8000 when I first started being involved and experimenting with NFTs but that price was way too much for me at the time. Oh well.
Anyways back to Checks.
I saw the tweet by Jack Butcher where he announced this project where he sold these checks NFTs for $8. These are now worth $4,352. A return of 544x in a month.
Yeah. A 500x return would have been insane and in my top 10 greatest investments of all time but hey you miss some and you lose some or something.
My thought process was as follows.
Crypto in bear market (this was before the 2023 Jan market rally)
All the Checks NFTs were the same so it didn’t have uniqueness to it
Jack has done projects like this before where he sold the same art for thousands of copies, they didn’t take off and were like a couple dollars
Highly likely these won’t take off if there’s not buy pressure in the first few hours/days
Then a couple days later, I saw a tweet about it on the timeline and decided to check its price. It was $28.
That was a nice 3.5x increase but there wasn’t momentum or hype around it and it didn’t really take off so I didn’t buy anything and forgot about it.
I then took a well timed Twitter break and crypto break and then the next time I saw the NFTs they were at $700. Oh f*ck.
I mean my thesis wasn’t wrong. It’s just you win some and you lose some. Obviously your brain thinks, '“If I had just bought $1000 of this, I would have like $100,000 OMG OMG OMG. I AM AN IDIOT”. But that’s just dumb.
Here’s the steps to take when you miss the pump.
Stop coping and think whether it will continue increasing and don’t let your ego get infront of you.
This one is quite important. Too often people will see something 5x without them and then automatically become a hater. Stop hating. Respect the pump and let it enter your life. Also evaluate whether it will continue to increase without thinking about the money you could have made.
You would have sold anyway
People like to say “I bought $10,000 Tesla stock at $2 in 2013 dude, if I kept it it would have been 2 million dollars”. No. It would have been $15,432 because you would have sold it to pay your bills or to buy some Google stock instead. Also even if you did hold on to it because of your belief in the fundamentals and you have a thesis, you probably would have sold it because it reached your target of 10x increase in revenue. People like to assume they will always hold until the top but in reality even if you didn’t sell it super early, you probably still would have sold early or even sold too late. There are a million other ways you could have messed up.
Respect the pump
This is the cliché “Be happy for others” thing but it works. Respect the pump and be glad that there are still opportunities are around. If something 1000x and you miss it. Hey at least the market and climate still offers some insane returns.
Mute/Block everything related to the pump
If someone bought the coin/NFT and went from a $100 portfolio to $2.3 million in a month and is euphorically posting about retiring and buying their homeless single mom a house, helping their grandfather with cancer treatment and helping paying for siblings to go to college and cure their sick family dog of 15 years. Mute them on Twitter. You can also mute the NFT collection as a whole. Just go to twitter settings and mute words. I would mute things like “[Name of NFT]” and any abbreviations or related terms.
If all else fails
If everything else doesn’t work and you still find yourself stressing and crying about missing the pump. Find ways the whole thing is a scam and really justify it. Sometimes when you miss out on a pump, you need to convince yourself its a scam. For example if its a NFT collection, convince yourself that it was manipulated by a group of evil whales and that it’s going to rug soon. If it’s a coin, convince yourself that it’s illegal and Gary Gensler is going to go after the whole thing and all investors will be called up. If it has a cult like leader, convince yourself that the leader has done the worst things possible and that as a moral respectable member of society and investor, you wouldn’t financially support such a thing.
The main thing is that worrying about the past and constantly thinking and regretting has no benefits and you should avoid spending time thinking about you could have had. The only benefit from spending more than 5 mins doing a post mortem is that they can make up for good stories. Like this blog post. Missing this 500x because of my thought process sucks but hey, at least there’s this post and relatively speaking in terms of dollar terms and multiples, I have missed WAY more during the bull run and spent a stupid amount of time sulking about them. That time spent sulking has made me get over these quickly nowadays.
The worst was when I was about to go to sleep and didn’t want to get out of bed to mint this nft for $20 because I didn’t think it was that cool to get out of bed. In 7 days, it became worth $1,000,000+ USD in airdrops, tokens and more.
Anyways, don’t worry about missed gains and start respecting the pump.