Investing in Murky Markets

The chatter recently in the markets is hard to avoid but is it all just chatter? I didn't get on the Bitcoin train and instead picked a few small marijuana start ups at the start of the year with my cash on hand. My long term investments I just left to wash out and will revisit them once all this dust settles. The pot side of the markets can often be blurry and companies don't always look legitimate due to old management still stuck on drill results. Having said that they still want to grow a company and return an investment for investors. Some though are just looking for a grab at that last straw before they find out they have nothing left. I would still rather bet on a pot maybe play than an overbought crypto giant just waiting for a major adjustment. A majority of traders likely scratched their head every morning as Bitcoin kept climbing higher and high and analysts through around lofty projections.

When a market gets ahead of itself it needs to retrace and find it's bottom or floor support. The crypto space even remotely connected to Bitcoin has soured and even the good plays look scary right now. But in reality isn't this what we really need to see? When the analysts all talked about how many Zombie Stocks were polluting the exchange most of us cheered for them to just die off so that investors wouldn't get caught up in the lottery stocks and focus on real deals. It's hard to imagine people would chase lottery plays but millions of dollars every day are spent on lottery type stocks by retail investors all in a hail Mary attempt to recapture losses from other plays. I once read that 90% of new retail investors lose it all in the first year. That sounds staggering but that's because they never looked at the mechanics of investing vs "playing the markets"

A popular trend can only catch fire for so long, then it becomes out of fashion and it's hard to tell what's just a trend and what is being adopted as a new industry standard. A high percentage of investors and brokers thought marijuana investing was just a short lived trend that would likely not survive very long but then it wasn't. It happens that fast. Crypto or blockchain stories are the same in my opinion. Most of us don't really know how they will shape our world or if we will ever notice them in our day to day lives but they are there. Some are just head fakes but some are slowly slipping into every fabric of our routine. One day we will just realize this is the future. In every movement there are pull backs, society is always resistant to change but we have to evolve in a digital world to protect what we have. I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss the growth ahead for crypto stocks. I don't know who the next big winner is but some high flyers will get brought down a notch or two and some emerging players will likely have their day. If you really stop to think about it there are an infinite number of ways algorithmic platforms can save us time, money and give us peace of mind. Most of which have absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin.