Brace yourselves: In the coming weeks, crypto markets will explode like you’ve never seen. Here are some essential tips to survive the madness.

1. “Hodl” is a meme for suckers. 

As prices climb you‘ll start to hear a lot about hodling. [insert 300 and Braveheart meme here]. Just FYI: “Hodl” comes from the early days when folks completely forgot about their Bitcoins until one day they heard on the news that this nerd money passed $1k/coin. They dug out their old wallet (if they were lucky enough to still have access) and thus woke up millionaires. In short: their inadvertent holding made them exceedingly wealthy.

The fact is that “hodl” doesn’t mean “never sell” it just means “try not to sell before you’re satisfied.” There’s nothing noble about “never selling” your coins—you tell yourself you’ll hodl through thick and thin—watch the comments like “I’m in cold storage and just grabbing the popcorn” while the market is in free fall.—but that means you have no idea just how cold crypto winter can get.

Your “loyalty” will mean jack-all when your portfolio has gone from $300k to $3k.

2. Take the Money and Run: 

Set a goal and STICK TO IT. If you’ve made life changing money, or just enough for that goal: a new car, a new computer, college loans, etc.—don’t roll the profits over into the next coin poised to explode — just take the money and run. Do what you planned to with it, celebrate, and enjoy your success (no matter what that success looks like). The bear will come and you can buy back in.

Greed is a bottomless pit and always chasing “a little bit more” will never make you happy. Remember that meme of the dude at the party standing in the corner while everyone else is having fun: “They dont know i have ETH.”

News flash: yes they do. But even so, living is way more important than hodling—and the people dancing, having a genuinely good time living life, are in a way better position than the guy in the corner with his ETH.

3. You don’t start spending the money until you’ve lost the money. 

I remember the first time I experienced my portfolio climbing $5k/$10k per day. It was insanity. All of a sudden money became cheap. Easy to throw away, easy to take for granted. Amounts of money that I had never dreamed could have become accessible to me had suddenly become nothing more than crumbs.

It wasn’t until the proceeding bear market—when it had ‘dip’-by-‘dip’ fizzled to almost nothing did I start to think about what I could have spent all that cash on. I had tried so hard to maximize my gains that I was afraid to sell anything—lest my portfolio grow less exponentially than it otherwise would have.

So many moments in the proceeding bear market where I tormented myself with questions: “why didn’t I at least buy a nice car?” Or “I could have sold enough for a house and still have more in my portfolio than I currently have”, or “Man I could have bought so much ETH now if I had sold back then.”

A lot of regret made me fall out of love with “hodl”.

4. The bull market does come to an end. 

Yes yes—institutions, mainstream, celebrities, El Salvador, PayPal, etc. Blah blah blah.

Remember: the “institutions” make money when the market goes up and they make more money when the market goes down. Governments are corrupt and will pass and nullify laws for their benefit.

The bull run will absolutely come to an an end—and while no one knows when “THE” bull ends, you can very much know when YOUR bull ends: when you’ve hit your goal.

Brace yourselves, and God Speed.