I have been following crypto. Last year I owned a stock in a company that mines Bitcoin. I paid .74 per share and sold it at a 30% profit (just over a dollar a share). It is now over $20.00 a share and had been over $46.00 a share. Imagine how I felt.
MARA
Marathon Digital Holdings Inc
$25.84
2.30%
+0.58 Today
Oh I don't have to imagine, Man, believe me I know that feeling very well.
I'm sure anybody who's been in the space for more than a couple of weeks knows that feeling.
It's fairly common for tokens to go from fractions of a penny, to pennies to dollars . . . even to double digit dollars. And pretty quickly too.
Look what just happened with dogecoin:
124 x in less than a year. It happens all the time in crypto, but good luck trying to figure out which coin it's going to happen to next. Kicking yourself for not seeing it coming is sort of like kicking yourself for picking the wrong lottery numbers.
That said, researching whatever it is you're investing in can give you an edge and help bump up your odds.
IMO, if you're trading rather than investing (different games different rules), you're much better off doing what you did: make a nice profit, cash it in, go on to the next thing (although it's always a good idea to hold on to a percentage of your position just in case).
There's a common adage among professional traders, "it's better to leave money on the table then it is to lose money"
Or as one trader puts it, "if you settle for singles and doubles you'll win most of your games. If you go for home runs every time you'll strike out more often than not".
And I can vouch for that. I have more regrets about not selling at a profit then I do about selling, even though I've seen some coins skyrocket after I've sold them too.
I've had to adopt an attitude that after I sell something, what happens with it afterwards is none of my business. Otherwise you can wind up chasing it to the top and that's when you really get hurt.
Realistically, a 30% gain in less than a year is a great return.
If you can do that several times in the same year . . .