Bitcoin...a "lotto play"??? As it trades at $2500...up 1000% in less than 2 years? People buy lotto tickets for the "thrill" of making a small bet that pays off HUGE! Bitcoin is a lotto play that already paid out the entire prize pool imo. So it is anything but a "lotto play" at this point. :-)
Set a stop loss? Have you been watching the daily swings lately? Where are you going to set your stop to be confident that it "might not" get hit? :-)
Next move will likely be doooown and take out ALL the stops. I just re-entered GBTC short today and yesterday after banking a 12% gain in less than 10 trading days. I started trading it with a "mythical" $1000 starting account value. I'll be "shocked!" if I haven't doubled the account value in a week or 2. Sentiment is very easy to figure out using the U.S. exchange traded bitcoin tracker GBTC. No trades at all in my bitcoin daytrade model for over 2 weeks as GBTC has not even come close to generating a short term buy signal yet. It'll be fun to see what the "highly followed" bitcoin advocates are saying after this next wave of selling coming here soon. I figgered it was going to start today. Not sure if you noticed how bitcoin sold off as the Silly Con Valley stocks like FB, AMZN, PCLN, TSLA, GOOGL, NFLX etc went into their swoon, and then rebounded as those plays all had a brief rebound. My only funnymental take is that the money driving the cryptos will dry up as the Silly Con Valley bubble deflates. Future is very dismal for all cryptos as they will follow bitcoin in all likelihood. And the future has already been determined by the past of the bitcoin tracker GBTC. This goes aaaall the way back to its "starting point" eventually...taking 'actual" bitcoin with it.
I realize the "lotto" comment sounds a bit ridiculous considering where bitcoin is trading relative to where it has been, but there has been some talk of bitcoin's market cap potentially exceeding $1 trillion and beyond (for over a 24X move from these levels) looking out over the next 5 ~ 15 years, which is good enough in my books to call it a lotto-play.
I've actually made most of my money by simply investing a fraction of 1 BTC in "start-up" cryptos. Fast forward one year and I'm pulling out full bitcoins in profit and keeping half of my original "investment" -- that, to me, is "lotto earnings".