Come to think of it, this sounds pretty neat too

Your analysis is superficial. Buy and hold appears to be a successful strategy because the money supply pretty much consistently expands over time.

How well do you think buy and hold would have worked if the government hadn't bailed out the banks and the auto companies?

We are delaying creative destruction and sacrificing the effective long term allocation of resources for short term political and economic gains.

The result is that in the above environment buy and hold appears to work because the nominal value of assets goes up. But it is not superior in real terms.

If we had a static or closed loop money supply (as it "should" be), buy and hold would be no better or not worse than any other strategy (or maybe worse, depending on how you want to look at it).

Further, I reject your assumption that all fees are exorbitant. The fees of financial advisors are exorbitant (and 99% of the are a major joke). But there are plenty of brokers that charge reasonable fees...

I don't assume anything of the sort. You seem moderately motivated, your own person, not afraid of risk, somewhat realistic, somewhat open minded and somewhat intelligent.

You are just an enormous dog to ever have an edge over the market, and the downside is substantial and larger than you estimate.

Your view that there are large edges in crypto you can get to if you just try hard enough is very very likely wrong. There are millions of people who hold the view you do. 95+% of people with your view fail in equities, 100% fail in forex, 100% fail in binary options, maybe 20% with the right traits fail in poker but 90+% fail to win enough for it to be worth their time with current conditions.

You're confusing paradigms imo. I think this view:
Is lazy and harmful and a pretty nasty thing to do to someone when applied to gambling with no known edge.

If you were working out, going after a job or degree, wanting to meet girls (all things with low bars where encouragement will help you gain the drive to succeed), then sure, I'd be just like Nick @ TCfromUB.

Anyway, here's the link about people taking out mortgages and maxing out credit cards. This mania and belief people are missing out and thus must get in at any cost, quit your job or uni, mortgage your house, max your credit, put it all on the line for the BIG ONE which is high probability if you just try hard enough, happens in the late stages of every bubble from tulips to the South Sea Company to billion dollar ant erection farming ponzis that ran for years:
to the multi trillion 2000 tech bubble. After centuries of mistakes and hundreds of ponzis and overvalued bubbles that collectively lost investors trillions of dollars, is this time different? Probably not. There are powerful reasons every other time was different as well if you read history:

- The South Sea company was a vast and unending way to bet on the wealth of the new world
- 1929 was the beginning of the new economy and the golden age of man and the end of war and strife, when we'd have flying cars and robots and incredible wealth
- 2000 was the Internet soon taking over most commerce as it exploded exponentially, 1000 bagger opportunities

You should read a book about life in the late 1920s. Everything you are seeing with crypto you saw then. Same arguments, all very compelling.

Happy to have suggested ToothSayer bought ripple at 3.30, gave me the arguments I was looking for

Fwiw my post wasn't blind encouragement (you perhaps didn't know which post as he referred to me by my name/poker sn). But I just wanted to clarify because I agree with you that would be a crap thing to do to someone looking for advice. I recommended staying in school, staying humble with crypto and constantly defining where the edge is coming from, and immediately taking some of the profits off the table.

I think that's stellar advice in general. Can't rationally define where your edge comes from? Stay out.

Yeah x1000. Anyone who has been successful in online poker will be able to sit in live poker game and laugh at the completely provable incorrect statements live fish/ regs make. As a simple comparison, if you think you are making money in crypto, you need to be able to justify why you are not the live fish who is 100% sure of himself.

Also; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnin...3Kruger_effect

I cant help but post this...I played a little NL tonight and someone said (in all seriousness), "I'm playing the board."

Now, the board was 45556. This is one of a very few boards where it is actually impossible to be playing the board...

This thread reminds me of the "should I go pro?" threads we were seeing back in the day.

OP I recommend just cashing out your crypto and forgetting about it. Congrats on getting lucky and making $xx,xxx

Your studies are exposing you to a breadth of subjects. The STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are the ones that are more likely get you good jobs.

Hopefully you majored in science.

I would focus on your science topics; maybe take some online courses. Make sure you have all the prereqs to get into a master in a stem subject. Then enroll in a stem degree after you graduate.

I was aware that I did not have an edge previously (and most likely do not have an edge at this time) [Edit: that is, in TA, but most importantly FA], but my question/idea was to drop out in order to fully focus on gaining that edge. What I get out of this thread above anything, is that this is likely risky in terms of $ and life EV, and that it is much more responsible to first gain the edge, and then start considering dropping out/changing life paths.

I think this thread contains solid advice.

What I'm thinking of for the near future if you're interested: most lilkely change degrees (had been on my mind for a while as I said) to artificial intelligence in September. This will give me at least 3 months during the summer break - and even more if I make the definitive decision before that - to focus on crypto fulltime if I still feel it will be worth it.

Sounds good. Good luck!

OP: sounds like a good idea to study IA. I am myself dabbling in Machine Learning.

Since you will have some time off... I recommend spending some time reviewing linear algebra, prob& stats, calculus. Maybe learn convex optimization.

Also, you have an opportunity to learn a programming language. I recommend Python. Learn how to work with data using Python libraries such as Pandas, Matplotlib etc. You probably won't have that much time to learn programming while in school so I'd recommend focusing on that during your break.

You could do all the ML coursework you need through free online courses. But you will probably need the degree anyway.

If you have a solid math background already, CS229 is good course
https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229

Explain to me where that edge comes from? I can explain in detail and with data where my edges in stock options come from.

It's not more responsible, it's more +EV. If you like money then not trading crypto is your most +EV move. Forget about responsibility, that's boring and pointless and too general and something to rebel against.

Good luck with it. I can't stress enough the value of doing hard math and physics if you want to become good at understanding systems from first principles, which is the source of all edge. Programming or CS doesn't have the same mental stretch, at least for me. There's a lot of insight to be gained into systems, modeling, and your own manifest cognitive flaws by forcing your mind to bend to complex bizarre systems that are far from intuition and have a correct answer (such as physics or maths). It's a level of training you can't find elsewhere except maybe linguistics. This is about your own cognitive development and not your degree - AI sounds just fine and is quite interesting.

Why not just trade cryptos as a side job and still pursue your degree? It's the same answer for all the other "should I quit my job and play poker full time?" questions. Keep your day job and treat your hobby as a side job and see if you can make money, enjoy it, etc.

Can you elaborate on how linguistics pertains to the above? It isn't very intuitive to me (though I know next to nothing about linguistics).

Linguistics covers topics such as semantics and construction, and strays into areas like formal logic. Semantic construction is one of the hardest topics out there to wrap your head around. For me it doesn't compare to physics, but anything which forces you to understand a complex system of symbols far removed from everyday experience or thought



and which has a correct answer (enabling you to repeatedly conclusively find paths through your mind which are flawed), is a valuable thing to do. You'll come across stuff like this in AI subjects.

It's like free weights for the mind. Most minds remain flabby and unchallenged all their life, full of weaknesses and flaws that could be found and fixed if they only applied heavy weightlifting to make them fail. You want to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger of minds and you only get there by lifting weights and popping roids.

Just to reitarate, I said I do/did NOT have an edge. Where the potential edge to be gained would come from? Investing: looking for potentially promising projects and investing in them according to a well structured strategy and with solid bankroll management. Trading: as said, much harder. Some guys claim to have an edge over the market by simply using support/resistance, channels, fibonacci retracements etc, not sure how to judge their claims at this point. At this point I am definitely not able to do sophisticated data analysis or something similar. Again, not my main focus, but probably useful to learn along the way.

Just to clarify, you don't see a big future for crypto? As is clear from my posts, I do expect the blockchain to be very disruptive in the next years, and therefore that some currencies will have amazing upside potential. Obviously I am aware that most will fail, therefore it would make sense to spend time picking out the really promising ones.

Anyway, thanks again to all for spending time on helping me out here

Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals

Juk

Why not invest in some long term holds while pursuing your degree? It doesn't look like you're going to be day trading.

A few weeks since OP and his 100K euro is worth < 50K euro.

OP, did you sell? Are you glad you didn't quit uni to trade crypto? Given that it's mostly holding long and all alts are way down, you'd be having a bad time.

Such a pitiless bump lol

Just want to see what he thinks. If he quit to trade and was longing various alts (the only real way to trade), he would have gotten pozzed. If he HODLed instead and stayed at uni, as he said he was, he'd be down far less. So it's a happy day of sorts (apart from losing 50K euro in a couple of weeks)

He's probably getting ready to jump off a bridge thanks to the good news. I remember the first time I took a big loss... It still hurts.

EDIT: Please read this as me feeling all that bad for OP. He was warned repeatedly just ITT. Greed is a hell of a drug.

OP if you're feeling like learning from this experience read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Li...pals+ray+dalio

He made a big call and got severely burned in the early 80's. How he dealt with it is just one of the really useful things in the book.

Hodled, stil hodling, indeed down ~50%, but you won't hear me cry about it like some kind of helpless baby. I like to think that I have learned taking partial profits is smart.

will let u know itt when milly