Worst trade I've made is trading BTC for gold. Lol.
But I do believe in diversifying assets once one has enough assets necessary for basic survival and subsistence.
Preppers, once considered the bane of carefree happiness, is now an important person in some hard hit areas of this country.
Hehe, I sort of did the reverse. Held a gold ETF for seven years as a defensive investment in my Roth IRA. I am typically pretty aggressive, so I just wanted something enough to fund “tickets on the last plane out” if it came to it. After seven years it was down 40% and I knew I was wasting my time.
Switched into GBTC in 2015 and got out in mid-2017 with a 1800% gain. But only because I was launching a self-directed IRA which then gained another 1000% before the peak in December.
I got into crypto in 2014 with a few thousand $/year invested from a middle-class income. By the end of 2017 I was founding one of the first crypto-endowed private charitable foundations. (Of course it lost 90% the following year, but things are back better than ever now. ;-)
Crypto is a wonderful tool for resisting leftist, totalitarian government and the surveillance state if used properly. And many of the projects in the crypto space are helpful to our cause. For examples, Presearch (presearch.org) which provides alternatives and a way to get away from the bias and censorship at Google, and Basic Attention Token (BAT) and the Brave web browser. And then there is Civic, which protects privacy while providing a digital identity that could be just what we need for honest elections and similar needs.