XRP Down 50%? The Break-Even Math and How Long Recovery Takes

There's been three times since we acquired Berkshire that Berkshire has gone down 50%.

If you bought XRP in the last year, you know exactly how that feels. Half your money is gone. A year ago, XRP was about $2.60. At the time I'm recording this, it's about $1.29. And when you're down that much, there's one question you keep coming back to.

How long until it's back to break even? [music] Well, we worked that out. We took the prices people paid, checked how far XRP has to climb to get each of them back, and how long that could take. And the first answer is actually worse than you think. To get back from a 50% drop, XRP doesn't need to go [music] up 50%. It needs to go up 100%.

And if you've held for years, you're waiting on a number two. Getting back to it takes a bigger move than you'd guess. And this year, plenty of holders finally gave up and sold when XRP hit about a dollar. Six days later, they were kicking themselves. And once you see why, you'd think twice before you sell all of yours.

And that was Warren Buffett in the clip at the start. He's watched his own company's stock drop by half three times. [music] And we'll get to how he handled it, and also to what I'd do with my own XRP. So, if your XRP is down 50%, should you wait? Should you sell? Should you buy more?

Before you decide, it helps to know exactly what you're waiting for and for how long. Let's run it. All right, bull runners, welcome back to the channel. Now, a 50% drop and a 50% gain sound like they should cancel each other out, right? Well, they don't even come close.

Say you put $10,000 in XRP and it falls 50%. You're left with $5,000. Now, XRP climbs 50% from there. That's 50% of $5,000. So, you're back to $7,500.

You're still $2,500 short after a rally that would feel huge while you were living through it. And the deeper the drop, the faster the number goes down. Down 10%? Well, you need 11% to get back. Down 25%?

You need 33%. Down 50%? You need 100%. And 80% down? Your coin has to go up 500% or five times just to put it where you started.

That's because every single gain starts from what you have left. The further it falls, the less money there is doing the climbing. So, the number that matters for you depends on where you got in and what price you bought. If you bought near the record high of about $3.65 last July, XRP needs 183% from here. If you bought around $2.60 a year ago, it has to double.

At $2, you need about 55%. And if you got in under $1.29, well, you're already in profit. And a lot of holders are sitting on those bad lines right now. Almost 56% of all XRP in circulation has sat in the same wallet for at least a year, up from about 51% January. Every one of those coins belongs to someone who chose to hold every day for a year.

And the biggest chunk of all XRP last changed wallets 6 to 12 months ago, back when XRP was still sliding from the top. So, a lot of those people got in higher than today and they're waiting. So, know how far XRP needs to climb based on when you got in. The next question is how long. Now, time is the part of a recovery nobody puts on a chart.

Say XRP climbed a steady 20% every single year, which would be a great run for almost anything. It would still take about four years to double. At 10% a year, it's about seven years. And for all those years, that's money stuck in one place. XRP has actually been through a wait like this before.

Its record in January of 2018 was about $3.40. It didn't trade above it again until July of 2025. If you bought that top, that's about seven and a half years of waiting just to get back to break even. Bitcoin had a shorter wait. It fell about 77% after its 2021 record, and it took about 28 months to set a new one.

And this isn't only a crypto thing. The Nasdaq, which is the index full of America's biggest tech companies, fell about 78% from its record in March of 2000. It didn't close above that record again until April of 2015. That's 15 years. So, even when a market does come back, it can take far longer than most people are ready to wait for.

So, how do you sit through something like that? Well, let's go back to the Warren Buffett clip. He took over Berkshire Hathaway back in the 1960s and turned it into one of the biggest companies in America. So, he's been through more of these drops than almost anybody. Back in May of 2025 at Berkshire's big yearly meeting, someone asked him what to do when the market's falling.

Here's what he told them.

There's been three times since we acquired Berkshire that Berkshire has gone down 50%. Uh

[clears throat]

in a fairly short period of time, three different times. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the company that he time, but but this is not a huge move. The Dow Jones average it

[clears throat]

the 381 in September of 1929, they got down to 42. So, that's like going from 100 uh to 11. This is not this is not a dramatic uh bear market or anything of the sort. If it If it gone up 15% instead of down 15%, people like they take that with remarkable grace. If it makes a difference to you whether your stocks are down 15% or not, you you you you you need to get a somewhat different investment philosophy.

Because the world is not going to adapt to you, you're going to have to adapt to the world.

Berkshire could wait because the business underneath kept making money the whole time. With a coin, waiting only works if you know what you're waiting for. And it has to be more than the price you paid. And that's exactly where most people get stuck. There's a well-known study on this.

A finance professor named Terrance Odean went through the trades in 10,000 brokerage accounts. He found that people hold their losing investments too long and sell their winners too soon. And it didn't pay off later, the losers they held onto didn't make up for it. So, it's easy to see why selling at a loss makes the loss real. It's admitting that you failed.

As long as you hold, it still feels like it might come back. So, you wait, and after a few years that waiting starts to sound like this post. Hope, hope, hope. I've been holding and buying since 2019. I've read literally thousands of these predictions.

Not a single one happened. So, that's what it feels like when your whole plan is one price on a chart built off of hope. And when thousands of people wait like that at once, it changes how the price moves. Back in March with XRP around a dollar and 35 cents, more than 60% of all XRP was sitting at a loss. And that number comes from Glassnode.

They watch every XRP wallet, so they can see roughly what people paid. The average holder has paid about a dollar and 44 cents. So, every time XRP bounced towards that price, it ran into a crowd of people who've been waiting months for one thing, to get out without losing. So, if you're one of them, the price you're waiting for is the same price a lot of other people are waiting for to sell at too. And honestly, that's the frustrating part.

You did what everyone tells you to do. You held through the bad stretch. Now, the price you paid decides when you get to sell. Now, a lot of people try to fix that by buying more. Let's say you bought $10,000 of XRP at $2.60.

Today, that's worth around $4,960. Now, you add another $5,000 at today's price of about $1.29. That brings your average price down to about $1.94. So, instead of needing XRP to double, you only need about 50% to get back to break even. That does help, but now you've got $15,000 riding on one coin.

And if XRP drops to $1 from here, you'd be down about $7,300, more than if you'd never bought the extra. So, if the only reason you're buying is to fix that number, the break even price is still deciding for you. Now, if you've held for years, your number looks completely different. For most of 2024, XRP sat at around 50 cents. If you bought then, you're still up.

Your XRP's worth about two and a half times what you paid, but think about the ride. $1,000 at 50 cents was worth about $7,300 at the top last July. Now it's about $2,600. You haven't lost a cent of what you put in, but it feels like you lost about $4,700 because for a while that money was right there in your account in unrealized gains that you probably screenshotted on your phone. And here's what makes that wild. If the number you're holding out for is that $7,300, XRP has to go up the same 183% as someone who bought at the very top.

Two very different holders waiting on exactly the same move. And a lot of long-time holders are tired of that wait. Here's one of them. After holding and buying XRP since 2016, doing this for my family, but I'm getting tired now, boss. But some people aren't waiting at all.

On October 1st, with XRP around a dollar 49 cents, people sold and walked away with about $258 million in profit. That's the most profit taken on any day this year. So, who were these sellers? Well, to answer that, we need to go back a few months to the people who gave up. Back in July, XRP had dropped to about a dollar and 11 cents, almost 40% down for the year, and a lot of holders were done waiting.

For every $1 people took in profit, they sold about $2.60 at a loss. At the top in 2025, it was the complete opposite. People were taking about $50 in profit for every $1 they lost. And by the end of June, the selling at a loss was the worst it had been in almost four years. Glassnode called it intense capitulation, which is a fancy way of saying people were giving up and selling at whatever price they could get, and XRP kept sliding.

On August 19th, it touched about a dollar. Six days later, it was at about a dollar and 48 cents. That's almost 50% in less than a week. Think about who that hurt there. So, imagine finally hitting sell after months and months and months and months of waiting and then watching XRP climb almost 50% just a few days later right after you sold.

Remember those people who walked away with $250 million in profit? Well, according to the crypto basics, a lot of them had likely bought right around that $1 low and anyone who jumped in late on that run is underwater again with XRP back around $1.29. In both cases, one number made the call. For the sellers, it was a price they couldn't stand to look at anymore. For the late buyers, it was a run they were scared to miss because of the fear of missing out.

So, if your XRP is down 50%, it has to double to get you back. If you're waiting on the top, it has to almost triple. Nobody knows when either one happens. Waiting, selling, or buying more can each be the right move as long as you decide from where XRP is today. So, with all that being said, here's what I'd actually do if this were my own XRP.

This is just my opinion on my own money. It's not financial advice here. Crypto's very risky. As you've seen this market over the years, you can lose money. So, this is educational purposes only.

If I'd bought a year ago and I was down 50%, the first thing I'd do is stop calling it a $10,000 position. It's a $4,960 position because that's what it's worth now. Then I'd ask myself one question. If I had $4,960 in cash today, would I put all of it into XRP at this price? If the answer is yes, then I'd hold and I don't panic sell near the bottom like the people who dumped their XRP around a dollar right before it jumped.

If the answer is no, why don't wait for break even? I bring it down to the size I'd actually buy today with that amount and I'd only add more with money I'd invest back into the market anyways from new capital that came in from my business, never just to bring my average down. If I'd held since $0.50, why I'd stop waiting for the top to come back. On the next good bounce, I'd probably take my original $1,000 out. Then whatever is left is all profit and I can wait as long as I like on that profit because then I'm playing with house money there.

Both plans do the same thing. They take the price I paid out of the decision. Every time you open your app on your phone, that price is there. What you paid or what it was worth at the top, and it keeps telling you to give it one more month so you're emotionally attached to the price. That's the issue right there, the emotional attachment.

One more month turns into a year pretty fast of holding. The people who bought XRP's last big top waited 7 and 1/2 years to get back to break even cuz they couldn't let go. With their XRP just sitting in a wallet, or you give up at the worst possible moment, the way so many people did right at the dollar low. And the number is hard to ignore on your own because you remember exactly what you paid. So it helps to have people look at your XRP only as it is today that aren't emotionally attached to one single coin.

So if you're wondering what to do next, I'm not going to tell you what to buy, I'm not going to tell you what to sell. What I can do is introduce you to the team that I've been working with over the last decade that has called some of the top projects at the bear market low. That includes Solana at eight bucks, hyper liquid around $20, Pendle before it launched, Ondo before it exploded. You name it. I've left a link in the description below that gives you access to my research team, our private intelligence network, and our top altcoin picks early.

And if it makes sense for you, there's a short form it takes about a minute to fill out, then you can schedule a free call with an expert on my team to go through your portfolio with you. You don't reveal your private keys, you don't reveal your seed phrase, you keep full custody of your crypto. We don't manage your funds. We just walk through your portfolio with you, then look at what it's worth today, how big your XRP position is next to everything else that you own, and whether it could be doing something for you during the wait. That way you can see how other investors in our community are earning yield on their idle crypto.

Then you work out together what you'll do on the next big move, regardless of whether the market goes up or down. So if XRP jumps, let's say 50% in a week again, or drops back to a dollar, you're not deciding right there on the spot. You already have a plan for it. And if it turns out that our coaching program isn't the right fit for you, well, my team will tell you that on the call. So, if you're not sure yet, click the link below, watch that video, or you can simply search Altcoin Pro on Trustpilot to see what people who are just like you have already said.

And whether you book a call or not, try this the next time you open the app on your phone that holds your positions. Look at what your XRP is worth today, and ask yourself if you'd buy that much XRP at this price. Whatever your answer is, that's where your next move starts. So, as always, I'll see you on the next video through the link below. I'll see you at the top.

You know what to do. Stay bullish. Oh.

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