1. Yesterday I liquidated about 2M pesos worth of my 2024 altcoin portfolio. Quick recap again: I started accumulating alts in late 2023 (original portfolio is here) with a target of 250-300% growth during the 2024-2025 cycle. With a little luck, I was going to use the proceeds to build our farm house in Cavite. For this reason, my internal label for this portfolio was our “Farmhouse Fund.” Now, because the bull market was nothing but a fantasy back when I started building this port, I cast a very, very wide net. I was taking positions in all the big narratives: AI, RWA, games, DeFi, DePIN. Because of how early I started buying, I got great entries on basically everything, and as of yesterday morning the total portfolio was at 110%+ profit. This essay unpacks my justification for selling, although I should probably start by saying that I only sold off a portion of the portfolio. That portion, for reasons that I’ll get into later, was at a 25% average profit.

2. So why did I do this? Well, we had a two-day holiday in the Philippines and I spent most of that time reading and looking at market data. Specifically, I was looking at market data from every April over the last 8 years. I found that in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2019, the crypto marketcap dropped in the two weeks between April 10th and April 24th. The average drop during those four years was 7%. In 2017 and 2020, the market was sideways, and in 2016 and 2018, the marketcap went up. Note that I’m referring to the general crypto marketcap, and not any specific coin. Bitcoin itself dipped in mid-April in 2023, 2022, and 2021, but the five years before then were a grab bag of ups and sideways.

3. The reason for the dip has largely been attributed to the US tax filing deadline on April 15th. Everyone from normal retail traders to the biggest corporations are subject to this deadline, and I found a few examples where it may have affected stocks and commodities too. The further back you go, the less pronounced the effect is, because the US market didn’t have as big an impact on crypto in the early days (i.e., 2016 and earlier).

4. At 48 tokens, my Farmhouse Fund was getting very unwieldy. I knew which ones I really liked, and which ones I had taken positions in just to join the bandwagon. (AIOZ?) I couldn’t realistically monitor all of them, and every week recently there have been new project launches vying for time and attention. (I’ve been studying Ethena closely as well as the Ether.fi Liquid project.) As of yesterday, I was in the green on 43 out of the 48 tokens I’d picked, so if I was going to take profit, it seemed like a good time to do so. At the very least, I could free up some headspace!

5. Although my tax-dip data is not *definitive*, it showed that there’s a 50% chance that the marketcap would drop and a 25% chance that it would be harmlessly sideways. There’s also a 25% chance that I’ll be totally wrong, but I feel like that’s pretty good odds in the crypto world. Worst case scenario: I needlessly gave away some profit. Hardly the end of the world.

6. How did I decide which alts to sell off? My logic was super simple: everything that was under 100% gains went out the door. Everything that was over 100%, I’d keep. It helped that my biggest gainers were category-leaders — SOL, RON, TIA, SUI, PRIME — and nearly all had some kind of staking mechanism that incentivized me to hold on to them.

7. In total I sold off 30 tokens, simplifying the Farmhouse Fund down to just 18 positions. My basic strategy for the next two weeks is to just sit and wait with my USDT proceeds, and buy the dip if/when it comes. I also want to take bigger positions in fewer tokens, so I can focus my energy on the stuff I actually have an interest in. My ideal number is 30 alts total, and I’m going to try to be more disciplined in picking them.

8. To be absolutely clear: I didn’t sell BTC or ETH. (Those weren’t part of my 2024 altcoin portfolio anyway, as I bought them as far back as 2017.) I also held on to the airdrops I received (OP, ENA, YGG, PIXEL) because those are zero-cost, infinite ROI. Overall, I’m still incredibly bullish about 2024, but I wanted to see if I could apply simple macro logic and optimize my holdings even further. My current portfolio is in the pie chart in the cover image for this post :)

Stay safe out there, cryptofam!