Journey to a State of Zen

I got started with cryptocurrency back in August of 2017, and I've learned a lot of very hard lessons since then. I've lost a whole lot of profit, and gone through some deep emotional turmoil over it, but I consider myself lucky, because overall I am still in the green. I have more money than I started with, despite the hundreds of mistakes I've made. I am telling you this so you can understand where I'm coming from. I don't want anyone to think I have it all figured out, but at the same time, I don't want people to think I'm totally clueless either. I'm somewhere in-between.

When I first got started, I didn't have any interest in trading. I thought I would just be an investor, and hold on tight for a few years. My favorite coin was Ada, and I bought 30,000 of them about two weeks after it launched for a little over 2 cents/coin. It was a really excellent entry point, and I felt extremely optimistic and excited about the project. But I was greedy, and I wanted even more. At the time the market was moving very slowly, and no one had any idea what was coming. Everyone said that 5-10 cents was the highest Cardano would go for the next two years, and I believed them. I thought I had plenty of time to try to accumulate more. But I kept hearing about people building their holdings up by selling and rebuying on the next wave down. And I wanted to give it a try myself. So one night after patiently holding my coins for more than two months, I saw the price go up to 3.8 cents and I decided to sell, thinking it would drop back down in a few days and I could increase my holdings.

This was my first attempt at trading, and the worst trade of my entire career so far. The very night I sold was the same night the price exploded over 8 cents, and when I woke up the next morning and saw what had happened I was devastated. I was so angry at myself that I refused to swallow my pride and buy back in at a loss. I stubbornly stood my ground and told my wife it'd drop back down, and I could get in later... Well, you all know what happened after that. It kept on rising and rising. And I never did get back in until many months later after the deep correction, and I still couldn't get anywhere close to the 30,000 I had held before.

Most people would have given up on trading at this point. But this mistake led me down the path of becoming a real trader, and not just a gambler. I knew that if I learned how to trade, I could slowly get back the Ada I had lost by making good trades. And I knew there wasn't any other way that was going to happen, because I didn't have any more capital to invest. What I had was what I had, and I had to make it work somehow. If I lost it all, then I knew I was going to have to wait a long while before I could invest more again.

So I was cautious at first, and I continued with my "investing" strategy, which was basically long-term holding. I thought the bull run would keep on going for at least another 3-6 months, and that I could get my Ada back by getting lucky on a different coin and trading out the profits. I looked for newly launched projects with lots of promise, and I did get lucky a few times, and made huge gains on Aion, Dragonchain, Storm, Electroneum and several others. At the height of the bull run in January, I had built my portfolio to over $15,000 in value simply by picking the right projects to invest in. But I still wasn't trading. I was still too afraid to make any moves after what had happened with my Ada.

And in the end that crippling fear cost me all my profits, when the market came tumbling back down. I was so emotionally hung-up over the $40,000 in profit I could have made on Ada, that I didn't take advantage of the $15,000 staring me right in the face. And the great irony is I could have gotten all my Ada back and then some if I had just sold all my bags at the top of the bull run, and waited for the inevitable correction. But I was naive, and I didn't even know what RSI was, or anything about technical analysis or market movements. I had never experienced a market correction before. I thought that a correction was something that lasted a few hours.

I needed to learn these things first-hand, and it was a very painful lesson. Finally, after the market had crashed down hard in February and started to move back up, I made my first moves and started selling things and moving things around, and one day I started experimenting with Tether. These were my humble beginnings, and I made lots and lots of mistakes in these early days, but I won't go into that. Suffice it to say, I lost over a thousand dollars on one of my bad "gambles", and this finally got me to start taking it all a lot more seriously. This was when I began my journey to learn the real fundamentals of trading, which was about 3-4 months ago.

Technical analysis, developing a proper strategy, and learning to control my emotions.

I started with delving into technical analysis, but I quickly realized that it was going to take a lot longer than I thought to learn it, and I didn't want to wait until I had mastered it to start trading. So I learned enough about it to help give me an edge, and I started to focus intently on developing my strategy, as I practiced with real trades. I learned that the key to success was learning how to control your emotions and execute your strategy the same way every time. If you keep altering your strategy every time you trade, you can never gain a true advantage from it. But when you execute a solid strategy the same way every time, you rig the odds into your favor. You are no longer a gambler, hoping to get lucky, but a trader, making your own luck. One wise trader compared it to the Vegas casinos. Your goal is to become the house, not the gamblers coming in to play the slots. The house always wins.

I hope this was informative and helpful for anyone beginning their own journey learning to trade. My goal is to continue growing into a better a trader, and to share that process with everyone here. The hardest part, I think, is controlling the emotional aspect of it all. That's something I still struggle with, and it's something I'll talk a lot about in future posts. In my opinion, it's the most important thing you can work on as a trader. And you may find that your journey to a state of zen makes you a happier human being as well.