Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #6

Always Be Listed

Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A weekly post I send out every Thursday. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.

Last week I wrote about the first ABL: Always Be Liquid. This is the second one.

Being listed means having your asset(s) for sale at a price that someone could come along and buy. For NFTs, it literally means listing them at a sale price. For fungible tokens and coins, it means having a sell order in.

I think there are many benefits to keeping your assets listed at all times, with the exception being your vaulted long-term forever holds of BTC/ETH/SOL and things you want to keep for years and decades.

The reason is that you never know when something crazy is going to happen. Let’s look at an example for how this works for NFTs first.

You bought 10 NFTs from collection X. The floor price is 0.1 ETH, and you’re pretty bullish on the collection. Your price target is 0.5 ETH. Well, if you have a price target, you should already be listed there – even if the floor is a long way away. This is much better than waiting for the price to catch up and then listing, and there are a few reasons why:

1. It is one less thing to think about and manage. Once listed, you can largely forget about it and only come back to check whenever you’re doing a larger portfolio review to see if perhaps you should lower (or increase) the listing price. This frees up mental capacity to focus on other things.

2. NFTs are literally non-fungible. Even if you have no “rare” tokens, you never know when a specific buyer is going to come along and pay 5x the floor price for one of your tokens. I have had this happen many times to me over the years, and as a trader, nothing feels better than something selling for multiples of what you internally valued it at.

3. You never know when some news hype is going to come along and cause the floor to get swept up. In a bear market, news hype doesn’t move the needle much. But in a bull market, things can get very crazy and one viral article can cause everyone to pile into a collection and spike the floor significantly. Often when this happens, the floor drops down again soon after. If you weren’t listed, you’d have had to be terminally online and watching and putting in the time and effort at just the right time to capitalize. By being listed in advance (at above floor prices), you can capture this potential upside.

4. You never know when some random whale decides to sweep a collection for whatever random reason. Seriously, I have had collections that had not had a sale in 2 years and a floor price of <0.01 ETH all of a sudden get 50 sales out of nowhere, and then go back to being dead. I have no idea why this happens, but it just does from time to time, and by not being listed you miss out on being able to take advantage here.

5. You never know. You just never know what’s going to happen, and there are all sorts of possible scenarios not mentioned above that can lead to an NFT being bought even when you thought it would never be bought or never bought at the price you listed it at. I’ll give one example: there’s an NFT collection “Grails” by PROOF. There are a lot of artworks in the collection by a lot of artists, and a lot of it is amazing art by amazing artists. But the pieces are highly illiquid and suffer from a lack of discoverability as well as lack of interest during bearish times.
   
   Well, I had taken the time to go through and list all of mine – some even at very high prices - and one day out of the blue I noticed that one of them had sold. What happened? Turns out the team wanted to offer one of those specific pieces for sale/auction using their points system, and mine was literally the only one listed. So they had to pay the asking price for it, which they did.

There are so many possible reasons to be listed, and very few good ones not to be.

Looking at fungible tokens, it’s not quite the same as NFTs, but there are a lot of similarities. The concept is effectively the same. For tokens that can be traded on exchanges that allow you to set limit/sell/take-profit orders, it’s almost always worth taking advantage of them.

For many of the same reasons as above: you never know when some news story or narrative is going to take off and cause the token price to spike wildly, before coming back down to earth. Not being listed means you don’t get to take advantage of this.

You also never know when some dumb whale is going to come along and market buy $500k worth causing a wick that hits 4x the token price, and it only gets filled if there are sellers listed at stupid prices.

The beauty of fungible tokens is that you can be listed at any number of different price points with small %s of your bag, and scale out of your position accordingly.

One additional benefit to being listed is that it takes the emotions out of a trade. How many times have you said to yourself “I’ll sell when it hits X price”, and then when it hits X, you go “well… maybe a little more, I’m so bullish!” only for the price to inevitably crash without you selling. If you have a sell target in mind, it’s usually for a good reason. Don’t let emotions in the heat of the moment talk you out of it.

At the end of the day, being listed is almost always better than not being listed, and it costs very little. So, whenever possible: Always Be Listed.