RE: Do Cryptocurrency Speculators Fear Utility?
This is exactly the point I've often tried to express, but you put it so well:
Once a project starts actually doing the thing it claims to disrupt within a market vertical, we can no longer pretend it will be world-changing unless it actually is changing the world.
And as you say, there are just a few blockchains that are at that stage.
I have lost so many opportunities by focusing on the fundamentals and not understanding how the majority simply bandwagons based on hype. I have learned my lesson, but I still find it hard to understand how the hype-investor thinks and acts. It looks like the phenomenon will continue. I sold my ETH at $10, but looking at the popular news it seems like people are just starting to get interested in bitcoin, and Ethereum is the next big thing. It's a pain to be too much ahead of one's time.
I also sold a lot of ETH at $7 after buying at $6 and watching it go to $11 only to come back down to $7. At the time, the chart for ETH looked like along term downtrend and with no cap on the coin, it seemed it would just keep going down. The crypto market... is weird. Maybe some day coins like BitShares and STEEM will take off and people will tell stories about how they sold STEEM at $1 or $2 or how they sold BitShares at $0.25 or $0.40.
Me too. Fundamentals have been the reason I missed so many investments. I never bought Amazon because their p/e ratio was too high. I missed Tesla because they have no profits and negative cash flow. I never touched Twitter because I don't understand how their business model would make a profit, if they had to pay their staff with money instead of diluting paper. So many others went to the moon based on hype not fundamentals.
Maybe instead of reading books like "The intelligent investor" by Ben Graham, "What works on Wall Street" by O'Shaughnessy, and "Stocks for the long run", by Jeremy Siegel, I should be reading "Navigate the Noise - Investing in the new age of media and hype" by Richard Bernstein.