This was the week that cryptocurrencies continue to be volatile while trending lower. Too many Elon tweets have burst the bubble as BTC (Bitcoin) dropped from its 65k high to as low as 30K in a matter of days.
It was like Jan 2018 for me again when my crypto portfolio suddenly went up 6x after having just entered this market 4 months earlier. I just bought into the top 10 cryptos by market cap and XRP was the preferred choice for a heavier weightage. XRP went from $0.21 to more than $4. BTC briefly touched 20K before collapsing back to 4K again. I was too greedy and did not want to take some money off the table and hence went back to square one subsequently.
Since then, I have been trying to selectively buy just the major ones and sell a portion of them when I think the prices are high enough. High volatility provides attractive trading ranges for one to profit from it. With the assumption that they will trend up against fiat currencies in the long run because of continued central banks money printing, I continue to have a mainly long crypto position for BTC, ETH (Etherum) and XRP. I have also recently dabbled in Dogecoin as a punt and for fun, having been influenced by the Elon hype.
The growth of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) was a direct result of recent crypto price appreciation. The newly minted rich nerds do not trust physical asset classes anymore and hence this new virtual asset class was created for them to “spend” their newfound wealth. The logic of NFT investments are still not clear to me and it still looks like a fad for now. Just like the ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) investment thought process, I think it is an ideal objective but it absolutely misses the point of investment for profit. If your goal is to profit from the rise in share price, then it should be the profitability of the company using whatever means to achieve it. ESG concerns should NOT be your focus.
As of now, I have just been concentrating on the accumulation of BTC as it slides lower. I have been putting bids from 50K all the way to 37K and all are now filled. My exposure is not very big and I am kind of like the HODL (Hold On for Dear Life) crowd and not use any leverage for my positions to ensure that I have better holding power. It is sort of like a wait-and-see situation. I also have sufficient unrealised profits to fall back on.
We are now into the second week of stricter Covid restrictions/lockdown and getting used to it. While tension remains high due to the discovery of new unlinked cases, there seems to be a better handle of things now than a few weeks ago. Seeing other Asian countries battling the same situation might have helped convince citizens that S’pore is not an isolated incident. Malaysia seems to be spiking higher and will have a new full lockdown soon.
There is an ongoing debate now about whether if countries closing their borders completely (eg. Australia and NZ) to aim for zero cases is a sustainable long term strategy. A country is interconnected globally and cannot be forever shut off from the outside indefinitely, else the economy will perish. Then what is a sweet spot if the fear of just one new variant entering the country will screw up all the best-planned efforts of protecting the population? I really don’t have an answer at the moment. So many tough choices to consider and decisions to be made by each and every government where a wrong call can have severe consequences.
The only hope now seems to be to achieve herd immunity via vaccinations. The downside of this hit home on a personal front for me this week. I had received a call on Thurs morning that my niece had suddenly passed away the day before. She’s 52 years old and we were undergraduates in the same faculty in university many years ago. We had not really kept up for many years but this was still a shock for me.
I attended the wake that evening and spoke to her dad to try to understand what happened. She had her second vaccine shot on Tues and felt unwell after that. At 4 pm on Wed, she was still ok and went to rest in her room. When she did not take her dinner by 8 pm, her family discovered that she was unconscious in her bed. The ambulance came for her and she passed away upon reaching the hospital.
An autopsy was done and the results indicated a heart blockage. Her distraught family are not convinced and wants a second opinion. They were not aware that she had any heart problems as she had been doing regular checkups. Her dad expressed some regret to wonder if they had discovered her earlier, would the outcome be different? She was a bit overweight since young though and did exercise regularly according to her dad. My condolences to her family and may she rest in peace now.
This reminded me of another close friend who recently had a stroke in the middle of the night. He apparently had his first vaccine shot just before that fateful night and woke up at 3 am feeling that things were not right. Thankfully, his quick-acting family brought him to the hospital A&E in time for a full recovery. My friend has had heart issues and has been taking a lot of medication on a daily basis. Did the vaccine trigger an adverse reaction because of the meds?
I make it a point now to share the above info selectively with friends whom I know may have been on a lot of medication due to various reasons. I want them to be aware of possible vaccine side effects. I suggest that some family members should be around them for at least the next few days after they had their shots, to be on the safe side.
While I think that everyone should eventually be vaccinated, there is still not enough data to understand the risks of the vaccines and its possible effects when combined with other medications. It has been a strange and unsettling week for me.
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