mmissinglink said:
In all seriousness, the key to cashing out I believe is to try to cash out not when you need to, but when the time is right. Generally, if you cash out because you need to that means you are probably going to be desperate to sell at almost any level even if that means taking serious hits.
I hope this doesn't happen too often to too many of us. I do know at least one SS member who has not cashed out but sold a bunch of his coins in the past several months and took a hit.
So, that's the key...try to sell only when it's most beneficial to you and try to avoid getting into a position where you need to sell when the market is in consolidation mode.
That's true but not always, not as a general rule. Price fluctuations aside of beyondhumanpower, are due to people making errors and other people taking advantage of this. But, people learn, and the degree of error thus shrinks, resulting in a more stable price trend. I think, at least until next big macro economical hay events, we have passed the bigger error degrees.
Second, it wasn't about 'cashing out' upon needs, it was about selling SOME upon needs. Yes it's possible that the price is lower than you bought. But same or higher (important - in terms of purchasing power of what you gonna buy later ofcourse) is also possible. This isn't measuring over a short time period, this is over the entire horizon, and fractioning instead of 'cashing in/out' can end up as good and bad as the latter. I have read older people saying afterwards that they would have had more success if they had done nothing, because the 'extra trades' of the cashing in/out game, made it worser.
Third, and maybe most important of all, it's exactly this 'cashing out' that makes price fluctuations worser. So actually, the logic of it runs in a circle. If alot people don't (and I won't), then your 'who has not cashed out but...' lost its very reason. A market consists of people, and if you try to screw people they'll screw you back, and, marketwide seen, instead of a win-win you get a lose-lose, since it's rendered to a zero sum game of which consequences scare off new market visitors. Much like the wolves and the sheeps story, with no sheeps left.
You are right on the short term and for another reason: silver is just like any money an inbetween step to what we really wanted. Trading is much handier with remote payable money (electronic) - these days are buying online, and it would be silly (at least outside serious inflation) to convert this 'easy' money for just a few months. That's not stacking anymore too, that's just playing the game that yoyo's the price up and down.