Lately, there’s been a wave of distorted FUD around buy & hold, sparked by comments from Changpeng Zhao.
Earlier, CZ shared a simple observation from years of watching every trading strategy imaginable: very few outperform the sheer simplicity of buy & hold — and that’s the approach he personally sticks to.
This time, though, he felt the need to clarify what many people conveniently misunderstood.
Buy & hold does not mean buying anything and holding everything.
If you bought and held every crypto token ever created, the result would be obvious — a terrible portfolio. It wouldn’t be any different from buying every internet startup or every AI project that exists and expecting success. That’s not investing; that’s noise.
In every industry, most projects fail. Only a small minority survive, and an even smaller group compound exponentially over time. Crypto is no exception to this rule.
The real mistake isn’t holding. The mistake is buying the wrong thing and then holding it blindly, hoping time will fix a bad decision. It won’t.
That’s the core point CZ is making: what you buy matters far more than how long you hold it. If the initial selection is wrong, holding longer doesn’t magically create value — it just locks in opportunity cost.
CZ also ended with a characteristically blunt note. If his posts don’t add value for someone, they’re free to unfollow. If you don’t see it, it won’t bother you.
At the end of the day, buy & hold is a powerful strategy — but only when paired with disciplined selection. Buy wrong, and holding becomes meaningless.
