How I Traded the 2022 Bear Market: Every Mistake and Every Lesson

I need to be honest about where I started. During the 2021 bull run, I grew a crypto portfolio from literally zero to roughly €220K. That sounds impressive until you look at what it was made of: mostly altcoins, a lot of BNB, CAKE from PancakeSwap, ADA, ETH, XRP — and a bunch of nonsense.

I was holding tokens from yield farming projects like Aqua DAO that were paying thousands of percent APY. At the time, everyone was doing it, the numbers kept going up, and it felt like free money. Looking back, these were Ponzi schemes that worked as long as new money kept flowing in. Aqua DAO eventually went to zero, of course. I didn't lose on it because I rotated profits back into BNB and other tokens, but that was luck — not a strategy.

I was also following YouTubers like Crypto Banter and buying what they called. I don't blame them for wrong calls — that's the risk of any call. The lesson wasn't that they're bad. The lesson was that I'm always the one pressing the buy button, and I should have my own thesis for every position. Taking someone else's conviction as a substitute for your own research is the most expensive shortcut in crypto.

I also had a decent amount of cash on the side. I've always kept dry powder. That saved me more than any single trade decision.

Around February 2022, I started to feel it. Bitcoin had dropped from $69K and wasn't bouncing the way it used to. The vibes shifted. People stopped posting gains. The YouTubers got quieter — or louder, depending on their business model.

I never went fully out of the market. I don't think I'm capable of that — I'm too much of a believer in the long-term thesis. But I did sell a significant chunk of positions in February and March 2022. In hindsight, that was pretty decent timing. Not perfect, not at the top, but I got out of a lot of the garbage before it went to complete zero.

The positions I kept were mostly the 'boring' stuff: BNB, ETH, some ADA, XRP. And I kept my cash position. That combination — having sold a lot of the speculative stuff and keeping dry powder — is what made the rest of the bear market survivable rather than devastating.

I also had a few gaming tokens that I was still holding on to, probably out of stubbornness more than conviction. Most of those bled out slowly over the rest of the year. The lesson: if you can't explain why you're holding something in two sentences, you should probably sell it.

Three events defined the 2022 bear market: the Luna/UST collapse in May, the FTX fraud in November, and the USDC depeg scare in March 2023.

Luna: I was actually holding LUNA at one point — I found old screenshots of my portfolio that prove it. But I sold it before the collapse. Not because I saw it coming — I was just rotating positions. Pure luck. Plenty of smart people got destroyed by Luna. I could easily have been one of them.

FTX: I never used FTX as an exchange. Again, not because I was suspicious of Sam Bankman-Fried — I just happened to be on Binance and Bitvavo. When FTX collapsed and took $8 billion of customer funds with it, I dodged the entire bullet. But the market impact hit everyone regardless. Everything dropped.

USDC: This one I didn't dodge. I had about $12,000 in USDC when it temporarily lost its peg due to Silicon Valley Bank exposure. Relative to the total portfolio, it wasn't catastrophic, but losing money on what's supposed to be a stablecoin is a special kind of frustrating. It recovered, but the experience reinforced that no asset in crypto is truly 'safe' — including stablecoins.

The pattern here: I was lucky on two out of three. Lucky isn't a strategy. That's partly why I built Alpha Factory — to replace luck with data.

This is the story I tell when people ask me about regret.

During the bull run, I found a private sale for a token I liked. I wanted to invest $10,000. I applied, filled in the forms, and then they asked me to KYC — upload my passport. My passport was in a different room. I was sitting on my couch. I was literally too lazy to get up and walk ten meters to grab it. I thought: I'll do it later.

I forgot. That private sale did 110x. That's over a million dollars I missed because I couldn't be bothered to stand up.

I'm not telling this story because I think you should FOMO into private sales. The opposite, actually — for every private sale that does 110x, a hundred go to zero. The real lesson is about the randomness of this market. The biggest wins and biggest losses often come down to tiny, irrational moments. You can't systematize luck. But you can systematize everything else — and that's what I'm trying to do.

This randomness is exactly why I'm now allergic to impulsive decisions. Not being impulsive, not being emotional, and just looking at the data will always save you more than it costs you. At the end of 2024, everyone was calling for a meme coin super cycle. I said publicly: I'm not participating. People mocked me. Those meme coins got completely wiped out in early 2025.

The bear market didn't just change my portfolio — it changed what I wanted to do with my time. I had quit my job to do crypto full-time. The market crashed. I couldn't just sit and wait for the next bull run. I had to build something.

I was spending a lot of time looking at existing platforms — the charts, the indicators, the communities. And I kept thinking: this is all either super generic, or it's these moonshot-call channels where someone promises you the next 100x. I'm allergic to both. The generic platforms give you data without context. The moonshot callers give you context without data. Neither actually helps you make better decisions.

So I started building what I wished existed. A platform where someone shows you their actual portfolio — wins and losses. Where the indicators are math-based, not vibes-based. Where someone tells you 'I screwed up this trade and here's what I learned' instead of 'I called the top perfectly, trust me bro.'

Risk Wave came out of wanting an indicator that was purely mathematical — no sentiment, no surveys, just price position relative to long-term trends. The DCA Planner came out of needing a system for myself. The bear market checklist came out of the mistakes I made in 2022.

Every tool on Alpha Factory exists because I didn't have it when I needed it. That's not a marketing line — it's the literal origin of every feature.

If I could go back to November 2021, sitting on a €220K portfolio built on yield farms and YouTuber calls, here's what I'd say:

First: write down your exit targets right now, while you're calm. Not 'take some profit eventually' — specific numbers. 'Sell 10% at this price, another 10% at this price.' A written rule beats a mental note every time.

Second: if you can't explain in two sentences why you're holding a token, sell it today. The 'but it might go up' thesis is not a thesis.

Third: those yield farms paying 5,000% APY? The yield has to come from somewhere. If you can't identify the source of the yield, you are the yield.

Fourth: keep more cash than feels comfortable. The opportunities in a bear market are life-changing, but only if you have capital to deploy.

Fifth: stop following people who tell you what to buy. Start following people who show you how they think. The decision-making framework is worth infinitely more than any individual call.

And sixth: when you build the platform you're going to build, make it radically transparent. Show the losses. Show the mistakes. Show the real numbers. That's the only thing that actually matters in an industry drowning in bullshit.