The end is not here (yet)!!! At least I don't think it is...we are even near an ATH (all time high) for bitcoin. But now - before the bull market ends - is the time to determine your exit strategy - or even if you should exit.

Listen is as I talk about how I messed up the 2017/2018 bear market and what you can do to maximize your gains during tough times.

Hey everyone, no one on this podcast is a financial advisor.

All information presented on this podcast is for informational purposes only.

And now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let's jump on in.

Welcome to the generational wealth with cryptocurrency podcast.

I'm your host McIntosh.

And today we're going to be talking about what you should do during a bear market.

Now, given that we are very close to an all time high, uh, for Bitcoin, currently

the price is 62777 so almost 63,000 actually briefly touched 63,000 earlier

tonight, all time high is like 41, excuse me, 64, five, roughly, depending

on what exchange you were using, it's an odd topic, maybe to talk about what

to do during a bear market, but I want you thinking about it now because.

You don't want to wait till the bear market starts to be determining your

strategy about what you're going to do during that bear market.

I'm going to talk about for just a minute, what happened during the last bear

market and how I incorrectly handled that as a example of what not to do.

So the last bear market was in 20, uh, let's see, 20, 2017 and 2018, it started

at the very end of 2017, really the Bitcoin price topped out in

December at roughly $20,000.

The alt coins, uh, Ethereum and whatever they topped out in January.

Now I was heavily involved in that market.

I was trading, I was, you know, buying coins, stacking, stacking sats.

We didn't say it back then, but you know, doing the things and we get to the top

and I probably wasn't getting the right advice, uh, from the right people.

And I froze ever seen a deer in a headlights, it's what I felt like.

I didn't know what to do.

The market was dropping and it dropped fairly quickly, um, over

those first few months and I didn't sell, uh, which, uh, selling would have been

one strategy you can try and time the top and sell the top or sell near the

top and then buy in at the bottom, hopefully make more coin, but you know,

make more coin, that's certainly a valid strategy.

I didn't do that.

Um, I held and then I held and held and held for, you know, the next two years

and saw my portfolio value go down probably 85% or more, maybe, um, you

know, which is roughly what the market went down and to be honest, it was,

it was not an easy time for me.

I wasn't dollar cost averaging when we were in the downturn.

I believed in crypto.

I think the only way to put it is I didn't have enough faith and unfortunately,

like I said, I wasn't DCA and I wasn't buying during that time and so we had

these low prices and I'm not buying.

So my portfolio stayed down and I waited until the market started back up.

I don't want you to do the same thing.

The best strategy in that case would have been, uh, simply to DCA during

that roughly two year time period and buy, you know, Bitcoin when it was super cheap.

I looked up, uh, Bitcoin hit a low from that $20,000 high, hit a low

of somewhere around 3,000, 3,500.

I didn't buy.

I didn't, I wished I would have.

I could have bought, you know, uh, during that two year time period.

I could have, I could have added a lot of value to my portfolio and I did not.

So, you know, that's why it's so important to plan ahead.

I didn't, I, I, I put no thought to it, you know, I guess I was thinking

it's going to go on forever, even though I knew better, that was not

the first bear market in crypto.

Uh, it won't be the last.

We'll have another one.

They may not be as bad as that one.

I think there's reasons that that will be the case, but, but they may be, I don't know.

So we have to plan ahead.

We have to make those decisions now.

Uh, and I would, I would hope if you've done your homework, if you

believe in what you're doing, it's hard to do, but what you really should do is

just kind of ignore the market and just keep DCAing.

DCAing, you need to pick tokens during this time period that are worth

investing in that are promising or they're already proven Bitcoin

certainly falls in this category.

Ethereum falls in this category.

Projects like Cardano might fall in this category of Cardano.

Now that they've launched their main net, you know, they've moved out

of kind of that beta phase, they don't have a whole lot deployed at this point.

Their, their price is actually still fairly low.

Um, and if you believe in Cardano project, then you know, pump that

money into it during, during that bear market, we may see Cardano just very

briefly, I think I will lay out what I believe is going to happen.

Uh, we, we roughly people, people have different opinions.

They think that the bull market may only last for a couple, but there are people

who think the bull market is over.

I think they're wrong.

Um, but regardless, you know, maybe it goes on for a couple more months

towards the end of the year.

Uh, we hit our all time highs, kind of like what we did in 20, 2017 and

then into very early 2018, that may be the case, maybe we hit a hundred

thousand, 120,000 with Bitcoin, and then we drop from there, you

know, it may go on longer.

The reason it may go on longer is because of things like institutions

becoming, and by institutions, I mean, large companies, medium sized

corporations, this kind of thing, investing in Bitcoin, we have more

and more opportunities to do that.

We have things like the Bitcoin futures, uh, EFT options now that are coming online.

Uh, we're seeing companies who are buying Bitcoin with their cash reserves

as a hedge against inflation, as a hedge against bad times, we see companies

like MicroStrategy who their only thing that they're doing basically is buying

Bitcoin, doing very well at it.

Um, and I think that a lot of this institutional buying is going to help

keep the Bitcoin price or keep the crypto, uh, market in general.

I think it's going to help soften that fall this time.

Maybe we only go down 20%, maybe 30%, but I don't think we're going to see

another 80 or 90% correction like we did in 2017, 2018.

Okay.

Um, so, you know, really that's it in a nutshell, you just, you need to decide.

What am I going to do?

Am I going to try and play this top?

Am I going to try and sell, um, my stuff into, you know, stablecoin?

By stablecoin, I mean something like, uh, USDT or what is it, USDC, um, meaning

coins that their value is not supposed to change, they're stable, uh, and then

try and buy in at the bottom of the market.

You can have success doing that.

Um, my concern would be what if the market doesn't go down very much, and

then you end up buying back in at a higher price, that would be terrible.

If you're not certain about that, I would advise that you probably don't do

that, but regardless of how long that market is, how long that bear market is,

whether it's six months, three months, two years, whatever it is, my suggestion

is you pick your projects, you DCA into them.

This isn't the time, and I'm going to give you some maybe controversial advice.

This isn't the time to be DCA into projects that they don't have a well-defined

roadmap of what they're doing.

They don't have a system set up, but I'm talking about coins like Shiba Inu,

right?

These meme coins who they've come out of nowhere.

Yes, they've made people a lot of money, but what are they actually trying to do?

What's the purpose?

What's the goal?

If they have one, I'm not aware of it.

Uh, if they do, that's terrific.

Maybe, maybe you shouldn't be investing in it, but I'm talking about projects

like Ethereum, where we have an environment that's built, that's out there, that's

deployed, that work will continue regardless of the price of Ethereum.

Ethereum may drop, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50%.

Those projects are still going to go on.

The DeFi projects that we, that we've talked about, right?

These new use cases, these, these things that are going to fundamentally change,

um, finance, they're going to go on, regardless of that price.

Those are the type things that I would invest in personally.

I would invest in Bitcoin.

I would invest in Ethereum, maybe some of these smaller projects as well.

Uh, but I want projects that have a clear vision.

Where are they going?

What are they trying to accomplish?

What need are they serving?

Okay.

So something to keep in mind, I would mention, it's funny, uh, earlier today,

I was listening to a guy, uh, a YouTube guy, uh, Collin Talks Crypto.

He's one of the people that I subscribe to and, you know, listen to their stuff

on YouTube, uh, he's an analytics guy, lots of numbers, but he put out a video.

I think it was his latest one a couple of days ago called buy into the pain.

And it's the same kind of concept.

It's when those prices are down, that's when you can create, you can create true

wealth.

One of the things I wanted to say, we can make money during a bull market.

I've certainly made money.

This bull market, our, my portfolio has gone up.

You can build wealth, true wealth during these bear markets.

When other people are running and you are buying the right assets.

And I want to emphasize the right assets.

You can create true wealth because the bull market will come back.

Bitcoin will go higher than it went last time, the alt coins will follow, or maybe

they detach and go their own way and they're not really following, but there's,

you know, the market is growing and you can create true, true wealth during those

hard times.

Check out Collin's video.

It's Collin Talks Crypto.

It's Collin Talks Crypto, he's a, a knowledgeable guy.

I love his analytics approach.

He actually has a website.

I, I don't know if he mentions it on that video or not, but it's cbbi.info as in

Charlie Bravo, Bravo India dot info.

And that's a really neat tool that he's built that you can use to explore some

of the analytics stuff that he does.

So, uh, I want to go ahead and jump off of that.

That's really all I've got to say.

It's not a lengthy discussion, but I think it's a very important one.

And I, I seriously want you to think about this, think about it right now.

You know, probably in the next few days, we may, Bitcoin may pass its all time

high and it may shoot up 70, 80 K and everybody's going to be all excited.

And I want to be excited too.

These, you know, these times are exciting, but I want you to put some thought.

What are you going to do next year?

Maybe the bear bear market comes, maybe it's late 2022, maybe it's 2023.

There are people who think that it's going to stretch out that long.

And maybe it's not, maybe it only drops 10, 20% and only for a couple of months.

And that's one thing, but maybe it is more like it was last time.

So that's something I want you to give some thought.

How are you going to deal with that?

My advice, just keep right on DCA, right?

Just keep right on buying, buying those projects.

All right.

Got a couple of news items came across this, uh, earlier this month, the total

amount of value money locked up in DeFi across all the platforms reached a record

high, over $200 billion, an amazing figure.

Uh, and that came out, uh, from the analytics platform, DeFi Lama, which I love the name,

but, uh, they do, you know, analytics analysis of all this stuff.

So I thought that was pretty cool.

I think you will see that value continue to go up and even in a bear market, it

may dip a little bit, but I think you will see that value because one of the options

I can do, maybe I don't want to put my money in stable coin because that is frankly,

um, if, if you're a U S resident, that is a taxable event, but I could put it

into, uh, a DeFi platform and still have it generating return even during a downturn.

So that's one option actually.

Another thing I want to talk about, and I do want to take a few minutes to

talk about this, to wrap things up, Bank of America, which is one of the largest

banks here in the United States, uh, released a report, they have a digital

assets group, basically they've got a group studying, um, crypto and what

they should, you know, how, how the bank should interact with it.

Well, they produced a report and it's a great report that I unfortunately

can't get my hands on.

Um, they don't make it very easy.

You're supposed to be like a reporter.

You can request it or whatever.

I did find a summary of it.

It's 141 pages and pastry eating.

Pastry ETH on Twitter, P-A-S-T-R-Y-E-T-H, give them a little shout.

And they did a great job giving a summary of this.

And I wanted to go over some of their findings.

This is really interesting stuff.

One of the things you've got, um, and this may be a little obscure, but

it's an important growth indicator.

The digital asset related.

So cryptocurrency related, uh, M and A's merger and acquisitions year to date

jumped to $4.2 billion up from $940 million in 2020 and $2.5 billion in 2019.

Uh, this indicates, uh, you know, a maturing industry.

So you got crypto companies, uh, buying other crypto companies and you've got

non crypto companies buying crypto companies, this kind of thing.

So, uh, that is, uh, that consolidation, whether we like it or not, is

the sign of a maturing market.

Bitcoin leads the way, uh, as it has for the last decade.

That's not changed.

The Ethereum camp loves to talk about the flippening.

Maybe it happens one day.

I don't think it's going to be this year, folks.

Regardless, um, the total cryptocurrency market reached 2.1 trillion, a hundred

billion dollars in daily transaction and trading volume, Bitcoin represents

roughly half of that, about a trillion dollars.

So that is a very impressive stat and one that they should be proud of.

Another, another point they made corporation, uh, corporate interest is growing.

And they had this fun little team called the bank of America predictive analytics

team, they use natural language processing in order to analyze 161,000

earning calls, transcripts.

So these are the transcripts that public companies have to release as part of

their, you know, public policy.

They, they make these earning calls where they release all kinds of financial

information and what they're planning on doing, and this kind of thing.

Uh, so they analyzed, uh, all these transcripts from first quarter of 2009

through August 2nd of 2021 and interest in digital assets, cryptocurrencies, etc.

Is that an all time high?

That's not the last time we're going to be talking about corporate interest.

Crypto is going mainstream.

We've certainly seen this.

You talk to people on the street and it's funny how many people are, they're

just getting into crypto or they've been in for a while or they've heard about

it and want to know more.

I was just talking to a friend of mine about NFTs today.

In fact, he's an artist, digital artist, and, uh, you know, he's not involved at

this point and I'm encouraging him to do so because I think he could sell some of

his art online and make some, you know, make some money, make some crypto.

This says it's estimated that 14%, 21.2 million of us adults own digital assets.

Now that is a pretty amazing stat to me.

So, uh, and that's in the U S 14% of the U S adult age people own crypto.

That number will continue to go up additional 13% plan to buy digital assets.

Plan to buy digital assets in 2021.

No, they won't all, but that would put the number somewhere around 25%

by the end of this year.

The average age is 44 and it looks to be split very evenly between male and female.

No difference in who's buying altcoin interest is rising.

We see this through stuff like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, this kind of stuff.

Um, Dogecoin alone, uh, you had altcoin mention increasing across both Twitter

and Reddit with Reddit mentions of Dogecoin jumping 3,032% in January, 2021.

Now from a governmental standpoint, we'll talk about that for just a second.

Interest in CBDCs is growing central bank digital currencies.

I believe we've talked about this a little bit on previous episodes.

I don't think this interest is coming from the individuals.

I do believe this is strictly governments.

Um, you know, the fed, the U S government body that handles this

stuff is investigating this, um, China already has a digital yuan in beta.

If not actually deployed as version one or whatever it's happening.

And it doesn't matter whether you like it or not, it, it's going to happen.

NFTs on the move.

Well, there's a big surprise.

The NFTs have actually been around for a while.

Most people, a lot of people don't realize that they've been around

since, uh, somewhere around early 19, uh, 2019.

So a couple of years now, more than a couple of years, but the interest

actually it's only been very late this year.

I mean, the, the growth, the graph, it's just boom, straight up in, you know, 2021.

Let's see here.

Volatility is declining with increased adoption and ownership.

Uh, it is still a volatile product, Bitcoin in particular, but any

of these assets in general, uh, but it's that volatility slowing down.

We will see as Bitcoin, you know, kind of reaches its, uh,

kind of reaches its, kind of reaches its value, whatever that value

may be, the volatility will decrease.

It's, it's figuring out its market.

It's trying to figure out its value right now.

Is it a hundred thousand?

Is it a million?

Is it, I don't know.

We'll find out when we get there, but we will see that volatility

decrease over time so that the swings are less wild.

Not a bad thing from a management standpoint, uh, it does not give you

the opportunity to make these crazy, uh, gains, you know, if you're, if

let's say the value is 1.5 million and that's what it's going to reach.

I just pull in that number completely at random.

If you buy it at 1.4 million, you have very little opportunity for gain,

obviously, but you have very little volatility.

So people complain about the volatility, but it's actually an aspect of the

market that you can use for your gain.

Uh, I did want to point this one out.

These two here.

Well, I'm going to talk about this one first.

It's another institutional one, another corporate one, and then

we'll come back to this other one.

Get on my little rant here for just a second.

Uh, institutions, um, adopting Bitcoin, certain, or crypto in general,

certainly accelerating, and that's a good thing.

And I do believe that's one of the primary drivers behind what we will see,

I hope as a, a dip, a bear market that is less than last time.

I don't expect an 80, 90% drop.

I expect maybe 20, 30.

If we hit $120,000, as an example, it may only drop down, you know.

Well, let's say we hit a hundred, just to make this an

easy number to do in my head.

Let's say we hit a hundred thousand, 20% drop would put it back to 80, a 40%

drop would put it back to 60, which is where it's at right now.

Um, that would be far less than what it did last bull market.

So that would not be a bad thing in my opinion.

Uh, and, and a lot of that's going to happen because these institutions

are coming online so quickly.

They're buying Bitcoin, they're buying Ethereum and they're holding it.

They're not trading it.

They're not day trading Bitcoin.

They're holding it.

And that lack that, well, that holding increases, scarcity drives up the price.

It's that simple.

And finally illicit activity, so illegal activity using digital assets, likely

represented less than 1% of the digital asset transactions last year, down

from 2.1% in 2019, I don't know where they get these numbers, but assuming

that they are accurate, less than 1%.

Now I wish they could have been more accurate with that.

Was it 0.5?

Was it 0.1?

Was it 0.9?

I don't know.

But even at 0.99, less than 1%, it's an insignificant, in my opinion, amount

of activity, and yet we have people, uh, in the U S, um, government, particularly

in the Senate who are railing on, Oh, Bitcoin is used for illegal transactions.

To me, that just represents, shows your, your, your, your, your, your,

naivete, lack of understanding, to put it nicely, maybe a few more words there,

uh, that aren't so nice.

Um, yeah, sure.

There's things that are done illegally.

You get rants.

It's primarily ransomware these days, from what I can tell, but you don't shut

down an entire industry because of this small amount of illegal activity, if

we did that, we wouldn't be using U S dollars, the dollars that I have in my

wallet, there's a high chance that some of those dollars were used in drug trade.

That's the truth.

It doesn't affect me, but what do we take away everybody's money?

That's ridiculous.

And these knee-jerk reactions to this represent, in my opinion, a lack

of understanding, to put it nicely.

So that kind of thing really gets my goat.

Um, I don't know how else to say it nicely.

So anyways, it was a very interesting report, uh, from what I can tell, like

I said, unfortunately, um, I couldn't read the whole report, not being a reporter,

but, um, anyways, some really interesting data in there.

We see a lot of this type of reporting of, of research being done by these

larger institutions, JP Morgan just recently started, you know, JP Morgan's

kind of interesting because they've historically, they've been like Bitcoin

bad, don't buy Bitcoin, don't don't.

Well, recently they flip-flopped on that and now they've started offering it to

their, what they call their higher net worth clients, um, and I don't know

what that bar is, but that, even that alone kind of ticks me off because

I, if I were a client of that bank, um, really, whether I was a higher

net worth individual or not, I'd be like, you know what, so what you're saying

is just because somebody's worth a little more than somebody else, that

you're not going to open up that opportunity to the person who doesn't

have as much money, that, that is not fair.

And that is the exact kind of thing that a lot of these cryptocurrencies

that Bitcoin people, whatever that they're fighting for, for, uh, Bitcoin

doesn't care what nationality you are, what color you are, what your income is.

You can buy Bitcoin, you can buy $5 Bitcoin right now.

And it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

You can buy a million dollars worth of it.

If you've got the million dollars, doesn't matter.

And garbage like that to me is just, man, that just, uh, makes me ill.

So anyways, I'll get off of that.

That's going to wrap it up for this week.

This is actually the third time I've tried to record this.

So it's been a little frustrating.

I do apologize.

Didn't record last week.

Uh, I was actually out of town, uh, on a couple of days of vacation.

Enjoying myself and I'd planned on recording an episode before I left

and I did not, and I just didn't.

So hopefully this will catch you at a good time.

I strongly recommend that you think about what I said, though.

You need to plan, what are you going to do during your bear market?

Don't be like I did in 2017, you will regret it.

I regret it right now.

I, I regret it to this day, uh, because I lost a lot of wealth.

I, I will say this, you can make money in a bull market.

You can, anybody can you buy, you hold, you know, you're making money.

It goes up.

You can make a fortune in a bear market.

What do I mean?

Well, that's the opp buying opportunity.

So keep that in mind.

If you believe in Bitcoin, if you believe in Bitcoin,

if you believe in Ethereum, if you believe in some of these others,

then you should be investing in them during the downturn and not

just when things are all roses, because the top will come, the downfall will go,

whatever amount it is, and then we'll be in this, you know, maybe we're in this

sideways motion, so to speak for six months, don't lose those six months.

There's some of the best opportunities that you have.

So, uh, if you got questions, comments, uh, you shoot me an email,

mcintosh.fintech.gmail.com that's mcintosh, m-c-i-n-t-o-s-h.f-i-n-t-e-c-h at gmail.com.

I'd love to get reviews on the podcast.

We've got a growing audience, glad to see it.