Readers often ask in the comment section: Is there still a market for altcoins coming up?
Regarding this issue, I have replied many times. I believe that a universal altcoin bull market is probably hard to see again; only a few valuable projects and valuable coins might rise again with the emergence of a bull market.
This view is merely my own intuitive feeling, and there is not much experience to follow, nor is there much historical data to support it.
But recently, after reading an elder's investment experience, I gained a clearer understanding of the above intuitive feeling.
This predecessor is a well-known investor on Xueqiu, nicknamed 'Retail Investor B'. He recorded his investment experience in A-shares from 2013 to 2023 in real-time on Xueqiu, and then canceled his account on December 31, 2023, completely 'disappearing' from the online space.
He is a first-generation investor in A-shares, having started investing in 1991, experiencing various historical changes in A-shares and recording each growth stage.
Although he canceled his account, fortunately, many attentive users on Xueqiu documented all his statements in detail and compiled them into a book, which gave me the opportunity to read that history and broaden my horizons.
In his narrative, he vividly describes the universal bull market and structural bull market of A-shares.
When A-shares were first established, there were only dozens or hundreds of listed stocks.
At that time, no matter what stock you bought, no matter how high the price you paid, no matter how badly it fell in the subsequent bear market, as long as the next bull market arrived, you could all break even.
At that time, A-shares were a market where anyone with enough courage could 'get rich quickly'. Because the number of stocks that could be speculated on was too few, when a wave of bull market came, after the leading stocks were driven too high, new players could only buy and dare to buy those cheap stocks. So for a period of time, A-shares were a market where as long as you could hold on to the stocks, even if you bought junk stocks, you could ultimately turn things around and even make money.
Back then, every bull market in A-shares was what we called a universal bull market.
Isn't this phenomenon exactly the same as what we saw in the early years of the crypto ecosystem?
It's just that the retail investors who rushed into A-shares back then have turned into today's retail investors rushing into the crypto ecosystem—year after year, the flowers are similar, but the people are different.
However, after 2000, especially after 2010, as the size of A-shares grew larger, with total market value reaching tens of trillions or even hundreds of trillions, it became increasingly difficult for general social funds, even institutional funds, to form that kind of universal bull market. Even before the stock market crash in 2015, even when the whole society used financing and margin trading, it was still difficult to form a situation where junk stocks all rose together.
In this situation, A-shares have almost never seen a universal bull market again, and only structural bull markets have appeared—only individual sectors rise, while many niche sectors remain flat.
This phenomenon is not only present in A-shares but also in Hong Kong stocks and US stocks, almost the same. Especially in US stocks, among the long bull market over the years, only a few leading and high-performing tech stocks have achieved significant gains, while quite a number of stocks remain stagnant.
Doesn't this look particularly like the situation we see today in the crypto ecosystem?
In this round of market, if we exclude all the meme coins that have skyrocketed, and look at those old coins, isn't it the case that aside from a very few projects that are still building and have value support, most are basically lying flat?
Following this line of thought further: among the newly emerged tokens in this round of market, how many are likely to rise again after this round of bubble burst?
I believe the answer is self-evident.
So we should abandon the fantasy of a universal altcoin season and seriously examine the tokens we currently hold, discarding or exchanging those we believe have no prospects or potential, and try to streamline and simplify as much as possible.
In the future, when we are preparing to invest, especially when we plan to invest heavily, we must be cautious and prudent.
