It was November 2017, Sean Russel a property developer went all in , meaning put all his lifesavings into Bitcoin and invest $120.000. And we knew back then his entering would be one of the sweetest spot that an entering could be.
As the story goes he as astonished and excited that is investment in Bitcoin in just 1 month peaked to $500,000. As history tells us Bitcoin went to $20.000 on December 2018 making it new record breaking heights. Back then Crypto enthusiast and investors are telling stories of crypto as a great investment in Christmas dinner tables. And other members of the family saying : "Oyaa??? Is is good investment ? Should I go in ?".
And like every investor back then Russel's dreams had come true. His morgages could be paid, the family trip of traveling overseas to lavish destinations could finally be fullfilled. He was waking every day happy that his investment rose.
The CNN article here: https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/11/investing/bitcoin-crash-victim/index.html
explained like this :
------------------------------------------------------------- CNN article -------------
"I think there was one morning where I woke up, where I made about £12,000 ($15,600) in one morning on my investment and it just kept going," said Russell. "I was thinking, wow, that's mortgages paid, that's holidays that I've always dreamed of."
The dream didn't last for Russell, who works as a property developer in the United Kingdom, buying homes and fixing them up. The price of Bitcoin surpassed $20,000 in December before collapsing to around $5000 around January to February of 2018.
Russell attempted to mitigate his losses by shifting money from bitcoin (XBT) to an offshoot called Bitcoin Cash and other cryptocurrencies including Ethereum and Ripple. But that didn't work, and Russell says the paper losses on his initial investment have reached 96%.
------------------------------------------------------------- CNN article -------------
Now in the terms of cryptoland :
He mooned on December and January but then he got rekt real bad around Feb 2018. Like everyone did back then, he didn't flip his BTC to stable coins like USDT when he was at profit (a typical case) or he didn't know such a thing as putting stop lossed because he probably wasn't a trader, and most probably would not put all his investment in the marketplace.
And then he started switching his BTC to shitcoins, coins that are not more than a database/ledger that is hyped, that era was the minting money from thin air, putting a website and putting a whitepaper full of typos and grammatical error like this article, and then luring noobs to switch their hard earned ETH to their newly minted unknown shitcoin, with no actual use case in the real world.
The actual real case was that the these coins went far more down to -98% of their original value. Because they are nothing other than a hacker who learned how to mint coins using Solidity with the same code just changing the coin tick and the total supply. And poorly educated (meaning poorly educated in crypto space) Not necessarily poorly educated in real academic institutions because many MBAs and even PhDs also got rekt.
So there it is Sean Russel mourning his regrets. Actually he could've got luck if for instance he flipped the coins to projects that are now doing great like BNB which back then was so cheap. Or if he put it all in MANA , it would be a different story.
But probably right now he already made his fortune again in crypto who knows.
The lesson we can learn is that nothing can be learned because even if we were in his position we might of done the same as he did. And probably just be careful and go back to the saying : "Invest only on cold money, or money we can afford to lose"