So . . . it's crypto-winter. You've heard "buy low, sell high"? Profit-taking now is NOT a good idea unless you expect Splinterlands to crash and burn (and, if you do, please sell me your assets at fire sale prices :D ).
Swapping assets, however, is never a bad idea. The Splinterlands liquidity pools are a relatively straight-forward and easy way to get a regular income. The question is whether you believe that SPS + profits is going to go up more than the assets you sell (my guess would be yes but I'm not a financial advisor, blah, blah, blah).
When SPS was high, I took profits by moving it to Binance Smart Chain via the Splinterlands interface, converted it to USDT with PancakeSwap and shipped it off to my exchange (Kraken) where I sold the USDT for $USD fiat and sent it to my bank.
When you sell assets, you'll be receiving DEC. Buying most assets require DEC (sometimes with Vouchers to get a discount). It is easy to swap between DEC/SPS/SWAP.HIVE/SWAP. with TribalDex and withdrawing SWAP.whatever to it's native blockchain is straight-forward. Again, these days, you'd probably be best off buying more assets that you expect to go up in price or converting the DEC to SPS for liquidity pool action.
One thing I never recommend is to speculate on coins. You should only be swapping coins to buy things or to take money out. Betting that most of them will go up over the next year is a pretty safe bet -- but guessing which ones will go up is a crap shoot. I think that SPS is likely to be as profitable as most other crypto (which, of course, is vulnerable to all sorts of things like SBF and exchange collapses -- and, again, I'm not a financial advisor, blah, blah, blah). DEC is pretty much a stable coin, unless something goes wrong -- so it is definitely NOT a profit-play.
A more complicated way to make an income is with Land -- particularly if you are not battling and have idle cards. Occupied Lands will generate SPS until some time in the indefinite future and eventually people with Land will be able to sell spells and items. Be warned, though, Land is really complicated and only getting more so! Of course, it's probably already complicated enough that you could probably pay someone to set it up for you . . . (if you're sure they're competent :-P )
Card rental and SPS rental will also make money -- but not a ton.
Anyways, I've blathered on enough . . . .
Thanks for your help. The route you used to take out your profits is a good start for me to investigate.
I'm not looking at taking profits now as a one time thing or to time the markets. I'm looking for a strategy where I take some profit regularly otherwise I just stay in the position I'm in, holding through both highs and lows and never taking anything out.
I have "lost" a ton of "on paper" profit by doing that over the years. Now it's time to learn to regulalry take some out whilst leaving enough in to keep working for me. I'm talking about SL specifically here and not ctypto in general.
At the moment I'm thinking I might sell CL cards. I know they are the least valuable but they are also the least valuable to me (mostly), just sitting around.
I could sell land but I'm hoping that will become more valuable when land surfing comes in.
I could sell DEC (once I've finished putting the decent cards I have on land) since it's close to $1 anyway.
I'm not keen on selling SPS since getting the timing "right" on that is more difficult.
Too many options. 😵💫