"Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered". This is actually the title of a book with the subtitle "Investment Wisdom that Stands the Test of Time" It's also an old saying from Wall Street that warns new investors against too much greed and impatience and it's used more and more in the videos of some technical analysts I follow on YouTube.

I'm not a professional trader, and I think that goes for most us, so I spent some time to give us all a chance to get better acquainted with the fortune-seeking animal farm. Or actually: the animal-like behavior we sometimes display when trading. You know, when we let our instinct take over.

The Bull

Optimists are said to have a "bullish" outlook; they see prices going up. This is based on the way a bull attacks, thrusting it's horns *up* into the air. Also when the trend is upwards we speak of a "bull market". [Investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bull.asp)'s definition: "An investor who thinks the market, a specific security or an industry will rise. Investors who takes a bull approach will purchase securities under the assumption that they can be sold later at a higher price."

The Bear

Pessimists have a "bearish" outlook and expect prices to go down, and when the market displays a general downward trend, we speak of a "bear market", if our misery allows us to speak at all. This is also based on the movement of the attack; the bear swoops it's claw *down* when attacking. [Investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bear.asp) is even more clear: "A bear is an investor who believes that a particular security or market is headed downward and attempts to profit from a decline in stock prices."

Bulls have a tendency to push prices up, taking a lot of casual traders with them who suffer from Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). Bears on the other hand press prices down (unintentionally in most cases, I hope) and cause a lot of casual traders to panic sell. Panic selling and FOMO buying: perfect examples of instinct over mind.

The Pig

The "pig" is always on the lookout for the next golden opportunity, their appetite for get-rich-quick schemes is infinite and they don't much care about risk calculation. They are the reason why the saying in the title of this post is used as a warning against excessive greed. "An investor who is often seen as greedy, having forgotten his or her original investment strategy to focus on securing unrealistic future gains," according to [Investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pig.asp). Only lucky pigs make money, the rest of them tend to lose a lot.

The Chicken

Traders that don't take any risks at all are known as "chickens". They make deals that can't lose money, but only make money in the super long term. The way to make money as a trader is to take risk, but to also *calculate* that risk and *spread* the risk over multiple stocks, time-frames and deals. Described in [Investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chicken.asp) as "an investor who is petrified of incurring losses from investing."

Lately the term "Bulls make money, Bears make money, Pigs get slaughtered" has been used to describe all those poor suckers who bought Bitcoin in December 2017 near its all time high and have since then kept their Bitcoin, losing a lot of their initial investment. Or even people like me, who started mining and investing in Bitcoin when it was $3,000 in the summer 2017, and haven't done the "sensible" thing by selling near the high, to buy back in later for a much cheaper price and gain money like a proper bear would. So...

Hodlers are pigs now.

I bet there's a lot of people like me, who simply are not active traders. And while we do expect gains in the long term, our primary objective was to revolutionize the world, and make Satoshi Nakamoto's vision a reality: a world in which individuals are the true owners of their money and are free to transact with any other individual anywhere in the world, without permission from a bank or government. This ideal is what saved WikiLeaks when Visa and MasterCard stopped wiring their donations; without bitcoin, who knows if it would still exist?

Also I ask you this: what if everybody was a true bear and everybody sold their Bitcoin near the high? Well that's not possible, I know, but what I mean is that if nobody held their Bitcoin, if we weren't for a large part hopeless hodlers who refuse to let go, wouldn't we have like a $500 Bitcoin by now? Market movements since December 2017 tell me one thing only: everybody who bought in during the hyped up CBOE and CME futures craze has left again. Those who believe in the fundamentals, the technology and the vision from the Bitcoin whitepaper have remained and kept their Bitcoin.

There is, by the way, a perfectly logical and human psychology based explanation for the urge to hodl, called "The Endowment Effect". I've written about that here: Who Do You Trust? Full Disclosure!. And to top it off we hodlers can stimulate mass-adoption like no other by doing this: Don't HODL! Use Your Crypto and Buy Back!.

And we don't fit the description anyway: pigs are motivated only by greed. Hodlers aren't greedy, they're idealists who unwillingly allow the bulls and bears to play their games, but pigs we are not. One last quote, to close the deal so to speak:

Despite these differing outlooks, bears and bulls both have the ability to make money; however as soon as greed takes over, rash decisions and needless mistakes are made.

Casting aside the appropriate protocol can lead to unnecessary errors, such as selling stocks at the wrong time. Becoming a pig can lead to your downfall, as you’re no longer able to reasonably assess the market and come to a rational, strategic decision.

source

Now, are hodlers anything like that? Do we really "let greed take over", or do we just relax, sit back and let the price do what the price does, knowing we're heading for a better future? I think the latter. What do you think?

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my ramblings! If you like it, please consider resteeming and / or upvoting. And I'm always curious to hear what you think, so please feel free to discuss below!