How I lost 30.000$ in the March 2020 Bitcoin crash.
Tags: Life Lessons, Economy, Finance, Bitcoin, Investing

How I lost 30.000$ in the March 2020 crypto crash (a list of my mistakes — so you don’t repeat them)

The progress I have made in the past 2 years has been wiped. I’m going to share my story here, and I hope it helps you make better decisions if you ever end up in the same spot as I did.

I fully entered the crypto market back in 2017, sold all my stocks, and went bonkers on ICO’s and falling in love with crypto projects. I took advantage of the many opportunities and went through the great bear market with flying colors, holding and increasing my crypto stack. I was a happy guy.

I fell in love with crypto.com. I have been a fan of their company since back in 2017, and I have watched them grow and work hard, while the naysayers have piled up over and over again. They kept launching products, improving and the amount of work I have seen them put out every day has been just staggering. I took advantage of the Syndicate, the Crypto Loan program and I used their offers to increase my MCO/CRO stack. I have been living the dream. I wasn’t getting rich overnight, but I could see how stacking 100–500$ here and there was adding up slowly. It would surely pay off in the long term.

Back in March, I took a 14.000$ loan, using as collateral 5.000 MCO (worth ~28.000$ at the time — 50% LTV). Here’s how it all went down (literally):

The Coronavirus came and the whales just saw this as an opportunity to crash the market to 3800$ in a couple of days. This is where the flaw in being human comes in. It just felt like all stars aligned against me:

had tax coming up in 2 weeks and no government help has been announced.

had a 14.000$ loan which was now at risk of being liquidated.

I made the mistake of taking into consideration the sentiment everyone was having on Twitter/Telegram, I mean … if thousands of people are bearish — surely the sky must be falling right? (hint — wrong — there’s not a single Telegram group or Twitter person without an agenda and trying to swing things their way)

The tipping point was a bug in crypto.com’s systems that triggered my liquidation even though I had ~9000 MCO tokens as collateral (i added more to make sure I don’t get liquidated — worth ~18000$ (when BTC was at the lowest point) for a 14.000$ loan so I should have been safe). Mind you I have never gone through a liquidation before.

System bugged out — Liquidation triggered. Seeing that much money lost, with the market crashed, with everyone bearish, with the virus scare, I am ashamed to say but I hard panicked and I started doing bad decisions after bad decisions digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole. I just couldn’t process the situation properly.

Now here’s where grave mistakes were made:

1 — I end up getting refunded 4600 MCO from the liquidation. BTC did a bounce to 4900 something — everyone was calling it dead cat bounce, going under 3k, everybody was scared and bearish, so I ended up selling the absolute bottom. In hindsight, there was another drop 3 days later and I could have rebought, but EVERYONE was bearish and I stopped trusting my own judgment. I was thinking “I surely couldn’t be possibly the only one right and everyone is wrong. right? right?” I couldn’t have been more wrong. I just kept watching BTC creeping up while everyone was calling for more severe drops.